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PKEFATORY NOTE. 



A WRITER on Biryden is more especially bound to acknowl- 
edge Kis indebtedness to his predecessors, because, so far 
as matters of fact are concerned, that indebtedness must 
necessarily be greater than in most other cases. There is 
now little chance ui fresh information being obtained about 
the poet, unless it be in a few letters hitherto undiscovered 
or withheld from publication. I have, therefore, to ac- 
knowledge my debt to Johnson, Malone, Scott, Mitford, 
Bell, Christie, the Rev. R. Hooper, and the writer of an ar- 
ticle in the Quarterly Revieio for 1878. Murray's "Guide 
to Northamptonshire " has been of much use to me in the 
visits I have made to Drj^den's birthplace, and the numer- 
ous other places associated with his memory in his native 
county. To Mr. J. Churton Collins I owe thanks for 
pointing put to me a Dryden house which, so far as he 
and I know, has escaped the notice of previous biogra- 
phers. Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, of the Record Office, has 
supplied me with some valuable information. My friend 
Mr. Edmund W. Gosse has not only read the proof-sheets 
of this book with the greatest care, suggesting many things 
of value, but has also kindly allowed me the use of origi- 
il editions of many late seventeenth - century works, in- 
cluding most of the rare pamphlets against the poet in 
reply to his satires. 



vi PREFATORY NOTE. 

Except Scott's excellent but costly and bulky edition, 
there* is, to the disgrace of English booksellers or book- 
buyers, no complete edition of Dryden. The first issue of 
this in 1808 was reproduced in 1821 with no material al- 
terations, but both are ^very expensive, especially the sec- 
ond. A tolerably complete and not unsatisfactory Dryden 
may, however, be got together without much outlay b} 
any one who waits till he can pick up at the bookshops 
copies of Malone's edition of the prose works, and of Con- 
greve's original edition (duodecimo or folio) of the plays. 
By adding to these Mr. Christie's admirable Globe edition 
of the poems, very little, except the translations, will be 
left out, and not too much obtained in duplicate. This, 
of course, deprives the reader of Scott's life and note&,*^ 
which are very valuable. The life, however, has been re- 
printed, and is easily accessible. 

In the following pages a few passages from a course of 
lectures on " Dryden and his Period,'' delivered by me at 
the Royal Institution in the spring of 1880, have been 
incorporated. 



f 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. PAOK 

Before the Restoration 1 

CHAPTER II. 
Early Literary Work 23 

CHAPTER III. 
Period of Dramatic Activity 38 

CHAPTER IV. 
Satirical and Didactic Poems 71 

CHAPTER V. 
Life from 1680 to 1688 99 

CHAPTER VL 
Later Dramas and Prose Works 113 

CHAPTER VIL 
Period of Translation 135 

CHAPTER VIIL 
The Fables 153 

CHAPTER IX. 
Conclusion 177 



D R Y D E N. 

CHAPTER I. 

BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 

John Dryden was born on the 9th of August, 1631, at 
the Vicarage of Aldwinkle All Saints, between Thrapston 
and Oundle. Like other small Northamptonshire villages, 
Aldwinkle is divided into two parishes. All Saints and St. 
Feter's, the churches and parsonage -houses being within 
bowshot of each other, and some little confusion has arisen 
from this. *it has, however, been cleared up by the indus- 
trious researches of various persons, and there is now no 
doubt about the facts. The house in which the poet was 
born (and which still exists, though altered to some extent 
internally) belonged at the time to his maternal grandfa- 
ther, the Rev. Henry Pickering. The Drydens and the 
Pickerings were both families of some distinction in the 
county, and both of decided Puritan principles ; but they 
were not, properly speaking, neighbours. The Drydens 
originally came from the neighbourhood of the border, and 
a certain John Dryden, about the middle of the sixteenth 
centurj, married the daughter and heiress of Sir John 
Cope, of Canons Ashby, in the county of Northampton. 
1* 



2 DRYDEN. [chap. 

Erasmus, the son of this John Dryden — the name is spelt 
as usual at the time in half-a-dozen different ways, and 
there is no reason for supposing that the poet invented 
the y, though before him it seems to have been usually 
Driden — was created a baronet, and his third son, also an 
Erasmus, was the poet's father. Before this Erasmus 
married Mary Pickering the families had already been 
connected, but they lived on opposite sides of the county. 
Canons Ashby being in the hilly district which extends 
to the borders of Oxfordshire on the south-west, while 
Tichmarsh, the headquarters of the Pickerings, lies on the 
extreme east on high ground, overlooking the flats of 
Huntingdon. The poet's father is described as " of Tich- 
marsh," and seems to have usually resided in that neighbour- 
hood. His property, however, which descended to our poet, 
lay in the neighbourhood of Canons Ashby at the village 
of Blakesley, which is not, as the biographers persistently 
repeat after one another, " near Tichmarsh'," but some for- 
ty miles distant to the straightest flying crow. Indeed, 
the connexion of the poet with the seat of his ancestors, 
and of his own property, appears to have been very slight. 
There is no positive evidence that he was ever at Canons 
Ashby at all, and this is a pity. For the house — still in 
the possession of his collateral descendants in the female 
line — is a very delightful one, looking like a miniature 
college quadrangle set down by the side of a country lane, 
with a background of park in which the deer wander, and 
a fringe of formal garden, full of the trimmest of yew- 
trees. All this was there in Dry den's youth, and, more- 
over, the place was the scene of some stirring events. Sir 
John Driden was a staunch parliamentarian, and his hou' .i 
lay obnoxious to the royalist garrisons of Towcester on 
the one side, and Banbury on the other. On at least one 



1.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 8 

occasion a great fight took place, the parliamentariairA bar- 
ricading themselves in the church of Canons Ashby, with- 
in stone's throw of the house, and defending it and its 
tower for several hours before the royalists forced the 
place and carried thera off prisoners. This was in Dry- 
den's thirteenth year, and a boy of thirteen would have 
rejoiced not a little in such a state of things. 

But, as has been said, the actual associations of the poet 
lie elsewhere. They are all collected in the valley of the 
Nene, and a well-girt man can survey the whole in a day's 
walk: ( K is remarkable that Dryden's name is connected 
with fewer places than is the case with almost any other 
English poet, except, perhaps, Cowper.) If we leave out of 
sight a few visits to his father-in-law's seat at Charlton, in 
Wiltshire, and elsewhere, London and twenty miles of the 
Nene valley exhaust the list of his residences. This val- 
ley is not an inappropriate locale for the poet who in his 
faults, as well as his merits, was perhaps the most English 
of all English writers. It is not grand, or epic, or tragical ; 
but, on the other hand, it is sufficiently varied, free from 
the monotony of the adjacent fens, and full of historical 
and architectural memories. The river in which Dryden 
acquired, beyond doubt, that love of fishing which is his 
only trait in the sporting way known to us, is always pres- 
ent in long, slow reaches, thick w^ith water plants. The 
remnants of the great woods which once made Northamp- 
tonshire the rival of Nottingham and Hampshire are close 
at hand, and luckily the ironstone workings which have 
recently added to the wealth, and detracted from the 
beauty of the central district of the county, have not yet 
invaded Dryden's region, Tichmarsh and Aldwinkle, the 
places of his birth and education, lie on opposite sides of 
th§ river, about two miles from Thrapston. Aldwinkle is 



4 DRYDEN. [chap. 

sheltered and low, and looks across to tlie rising ground 
on the summit of which Tichmarsh church rises, flanked 
hard by with a huge cedar -tree on the rectory lawn, a 
cedar-tree certainly coeval with Dry den, since it was plant- 
ed two years before his birth. A little beyond Aldwinkle, 
following the course of the river, is the small church of 
Pilton, where Erasmus Dryden and Mary Pickering were 
married on October 21, 1630. All these villages are em- 
bowered in trees of all kinds, elms and walnuts especially, 
and the river banks slope in places with a pleasant abrupt- 
ness, giving good views of the magnificent woods of Lil- 
ford, which, however, are new-comers, comparatively speak- 
ing. Another mile or two beyond Pilton brings the walk- 
er to Oundle, which has some traditional claim to the credit 
of teaching Dryden his earliest humanities ; and the same 
distance beyond Oundle is Cotterstock, where a house, still 
standing, but altered, was the poet's favourite sojourn in 
his later years. Long stretches of meadowy lead thence 
across the river into Huntingdonshire, and there, just short 
of the great north road, lies the village of Chesterton, the 
residence, in the late days of the seventeenth century, of 
Dryden's favourite cousins, and frequently his own. All 
these places are intimately connected with his memory, 
and the last named is not more than twenty miles from 
the first. Between Cotterstock and Chesterton, where lay 
the two houses of his kinsfolk which we know him to 
have most frequented, lies, as it lay then, the grim and 
shapeless mound studded with ancient thorn -trees, and 
looking down upon the silent Nene, which is all that re- 
mains of the castle of Fotheringhay. Now, as then, the 
great lantern of the church, with its flying buttresses and 
tormented tracery, looks out over the valley. There is no 
allusion that I know of to Fotheringhay in Dryden's 



I.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. f. 

works, and, indued, there seems to have been a very natu- 
ral feeling among all seventeenth century writers on the 
court side that the less said about Mary Stuart the better. 
Fothcringhay waits until Mr. Swinburne shall complete the 
trilDgy begun in Chaistelard and continued in Bothwell, for 
an English dramatic poet to tread worthily in the steps of 
Montchrestien, of Vondel, and of Schiller. But Dryden 
must have passed it constantly ; when he was at Cotter- 
stock he must have had it almost under his eyes, and 
we know that he was always brooding over fit historical 
subjects in English history for the higher poetry. Nor 
is it, I think, an unpardonable conceit to note the domi- 
nance in the haunts of this intellectually greatest among 
the partisans of the Stuarts, of the scene of the great- 
est tragedy, save one, that befell even that house of the 
furies. 

(f- -There is exceedingly little information obtainable about 
Dryden's youth) The inscription in Tichmarsh Church, 
the work of his cousin Mrs. Creed, an excellent person 
whose needle and pencil decorated half the churches and 
half the manor-houses in that part of the country, boasts 
that he had his early education in that village, while Oun- 
dle, as has been said, has some traditional claims to a simi- 
lar distinction. From the date of his birth to his entry 
at Westminster School we have no positive information 
whatever about him, and even the precise date of the lat- 
ter is unknown.' He was a king's scholar, and it seems 
that the redoubtable Busby took pains with him — doubt- 
less in the well-known Busbeian manner — and liked his 
verse translations. From Westminster he went to Cam- 
bridge, where he was entered at Trinity on May 18th, 
1650, matriculated on July 16th, and on October 2nd was 
elected to a Westminster scholarship. He was then nine- 



R DRYDEN. [chap. 

teeu, an instance, be it observed, among many, of the com- 
plete mistake of supposing that very early entrance into 
the universities was the rule before our own days. Of 
Dryden's Cambridge sojourn we know little more than of 
his sojourn at Westminster. He was in trouble on July 
19th, 1652, w^hen he was discommonsed and gated for a 
fortnight for disobedience and contumacy. Shad well also 
says that while at Cambridge he " scurrilously traduced 
a nobleman," and was " rebuked on the head " therefor. 
But Shadwell's unsupported assertions about Dryden are 
unworthy of the slightest credence. He took his degree 
in 1654, and though he gained no fellowship, seems to 
have resided for nearly seven years at the university. 

(There has been a good deal of controversy about the feel- 
ings with which Dryden regarded his alma mater. It is 
certainly curious that, except a formal acknowledgment of 
having received his education from Trinity, there is to be 
found in his works no kind of affectionate reference to 
Cambridge, while there is to be found an extremely un- 
V kind reference to her in his very best manner. In one of 
his numerous prologues to the University of Oxford — the 
University of Cambridge seems to have given him no oc- 
casion of writing a prologue — occur the famous lines, 

" Oxford to him a dearer name shall be 
Than his own mother university ; 
Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage, 
He chooses Athens in his riper age." 

It has been souo-ht to diminish the force of this very left- 
handed compliment to Cambridge by quoting a phrase of 
Dryden's concerning the "gross flattery that universities 
will endure." But I am inclined to think that most uni- 
versity men will agree with me that this is probably a 



1.] BEFORE THE RESTORATIOX. 1 

unique instance of a member of the one university going- 
out of his way to flatter the other at the expense of his 
wn. Dryden was one of the most accomplished flatter- 
^ii> that ever lived, and certainly had no need save of de- 
lib.^ rate choice to resort to the vulgar expedient of insult- 
ing one person or body by way of praising another. What 
his cause of dissatisfaction was it is impossible to say, but 
the trivial occurrence already mentioned certainly will not 
account for it. 

"*If, however, during these years we have little testimo- 
ny About Dryden, we have three documents from his own 
hand which are of no little interest. Although Dryden 
was one of the most late-writing of English poets, he had 
got into print before he left Westminster. A promising 
pupil of that school, Lord Hastings, had died of small-pox, 
and, according to the fashion of the time, a tombeau, as it 
would have been called in France, was published, containing 
elegies by a very large number of authors, ranging from 
Westminster boys to the already famous names of Waller 
and Den ham. Somewhat later an epistle commendatory 
was contributed by Dryden to a volume of religious verse 
by his friend John Hoddesdon. Later still, and probably 
after he had taken his degree, he wrote a letter to his 
cousin, Honor Driden, daughter of the reigning baronet 
of Canons Ashby, which the young lady had the grace 
to keep. All these juvenile productions have been very 
severely judged. As to the poems, the latest writer on 
the subject, a writer in the Quarterly Review^ whom I cer- 
tainly do not name otherwise than honoris causa, pro- 
nounces the one execrable, and the other inferior to the 
juvenile productions of that miserable poetaster, Kirke 
White. It seems to this reviewer that Dryden had at this 
time " no ear for verse, n command of poetic diction, 



8 DRYDEN. [chap. 

no sense of poetic taste." As to the letter, even Scott 
describes it as " alternately coarse and pedantic." I am 
in hopeless discord with these authorities, both of who^*t- 
I respect. Certainly neither the elegy on Lord Hastinsii, 
nor the complimentary poem to Hoddesdon, nor the letter 
to Honor Driden, is a masterpiece. But all three show, 
as it seems to me, a considerable literary faculty, a remark- 
able feeling after poetic style, and above all the peculiar 
virtue which was to be Dry den's own. They are all sat- 
urated with conceits, and the conceit was the reigning 
delicacy of the time. Now, if there is one thing more 
characteristic and more honourably characteristic of Dry- 
den than another, it is that he was emphatically of his 
time. No one ever adopted more thoroughly and more 
unconsciously the motto as to Spartam nactus es. He tried 
every fashion, and where the fashion was capable of being 
brought sub specie ceternitatis he never failed so to bring it. 
Where it was not so capable he never failed to abandon 
it and to substitute something better. A man of this tem- 
perament (which it may be observed is a mingling of the 
critical and the poetical temperaments) is not likely to 
find his way early or to find it at all without a good many 
preliminary wanderings. But the two poems so severely 
condemned, though they are certainly not good poems, are 
beyond all doubl possessed of the elements of goodness. 
I doubt myself whether any one can fairly judge them 
who has not passed through a novitiate of careful study 
of the minor poets of his own day. By doing this one 
acquires a certain faculty of distinguishing, as Theophile 
Gautier once put it in his own case, " the sheep of Hugo 
from the goats of Scribe." I do not hesitate to say that 
an intelligent reviewer in the year 1650 would have rank- 
ed Dry den, though perhaps with some misgivings, among 



r.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 9 

the sheep. The faults are simply an exaggeration of the 
prevailing style, the merits are different. 

As for the epistle to Honor Driden, Scott must surely 
have been thinking of the evil counsellors who wished him 
to bowdlerise glorious John, when he called it "coarse." 
There is nothing in it but the outspoken gallantry of an 
age which was not afraid of speaking out, and the prose 
style is already of no inconsiderable merit. It should be 
observed, however, that a most unsubstantial romance has 
been built up on this letter, and that Miss Honor's father, 
Si#» John Dj-iden, has had all sorts of anathemas launched 
at him, in the Locksley Hall style, for damming the course 
of t»"ue love. There is no evidence whatever to prove this 
crime against Sir John. It is in the nature of mankind 
almost invariably to fall in love with its cousins, and — 
fortunately according to some physiologists — by no means 
invariably to marry them. That Dryden seriously aspired 
to feis cousin's hand there is no proof, and none that her 
father refused to sanction the marriage. On the contrary, 
his foes accuse him of being a dreadful flirt, and of mak- 
ing " the young blushing virgins die " for him in a miscel- 
laneous but probably harmless manner. All that is posi- 
tively known on the subject is that Honor never married, 
that tlie cousins were on excellent terms some half-century 
after this fervent epistle, and that Miss Driden is said to 
have treasured the letter and shown it with pride, which is 
much more reconcilable with the idea of a harmless flirta- 
tion than of a great passion tragically cut short. 

At the time of the writing of this epistle Dryden was, 
indeed, not exactly an eligible suitor. His father had just 
died— 1654— and had left him two-thirds of the Blakesley 
estates, with a reversion to the other third at the death of 

his mother. The land extended to a couple of hundred 
B ^ 



10 DRYDEX. [chap. 

acres or thereabouts, and the rent, which with characteris- 
tic generosity Dryden never increased, though rents went 
up in his time enormously, amounted to 60^. a year. Dry- 
den's two-thirds were estimated by Malone at the end of 
the last century to be worth about 120/. income of that 
day, and this certainly equals at least 200/. to-day. With 
this to fall back upon, and with the influence of the D;'i- 
den and Pickering families, any bachelor in those days 
might be considered provided with prospects; but exacting 
parents might consider the total inadequate to the support 
of a wife and family. Sir John Driden iS said, though a 
fanatical Puritan, to have been a man of no very strong 
intellect, and he certainly did not feather his nest in the 
way which was open to any defender of the liberties of 
the people. Sir Gilbert Pickering, who, in consequence 
of the intermarriages before alluded to, was doubly Dry- 
den's cousin, was wiser in his generation. He was one of 
the few members of the Long Parliament who judiciously 
attached themselves to the fortunes of Cromwell, and was 
plentifully rewarded with fines, booty, places, and honours, 
by the Protector. When Dryden finally left Cambridge 
in 1657, he is said to have attached himself to this kins- 
man. And at the end of the next year he wrote his re- 
markable Heroic Stanzas on Cromwell's death. This' 
poem must have at once put out of doubt his literary 
merits. There was assuredly no English poet then living, 
except Milton and Cowley, who could possibly have writ- 
ten it, and it was sufiiciently different from the style of 
either of those masters. Taking the four -line stanza, 
which Davenant had made popular, the poet starts with 
a bold opening, in which the stately march of the verse is 
not to be disguised by all the frippery of erudition which 
loads it : 



J.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 11 

" And now 'tis time ; for their officious haste, 

Who would before have borne him to the sky, 
Like eager Romans, ere all rites were past, 
Did let too soon the sacred eagle fly." 

The whole poem contains but thirty -seven of these 
stanzas, but it is full of admirable lines and thoughts. No 
doubt there are plenty of conceits as well, and Dryden 
would not have been Dryden if there had not been. But 
at the same time the singular justness which always marked 
his praise, as well as his blame, is as remarkable in the 
matter of the poem, as the force and vigour of the diction 
and versification are in its manner. To this day no better 
eulogy of the Protector has been written, and the poet 
with a remarkable dexterity evades, without directly de 
nying, the more awkward points in his hero's career and 
character. One thing which must strike all careful readers 
of the poem is the entire absence of any attack on the 
royalist party. To attempt, as Shadwell and other libellers 
attempted a quarter of a century later, to construe a fa- 
mous couplet — 

" He fought to end our fighting, and essayed 
To staunch the blood by breathing of the vein — " 

into an approval of the execution of Charles I., is to wrest 
the sense of the original hopelessly and unpardonably. 
Cromwell's conduct is contrasted with that of those who 
" the quarrel loved, but did the cause abhor," who " first 
sought 'to inflame the parties, then to poise," &c., i. e., with 
Essex, Manchester, and their likes ; and it need hardly be 
said that this contrast was ended years before there was 
any question of the king's death. Indeed, to a careful 
reader nowadavs tViA TT^^^oic Stanzas read much more like 

hedge between the parties than 



12 DRYDEN. [chap. 

like an attempt to gain favour from the roundheads by 
uncompromising advocacy of their cause. The author is 
one of those " sticklers of the war "■ that he himself de- 
scribes. 

It is possible that a certain half-heartedness may have 
been observed in Dryden by those of his cousin's party. 
It is possible, too, that Sir Gilbert Pickering, like Thack- 
eray's Mr. Scully, vras a good deal more bent on making 
use of his young kinsman than on rewarding him in any 
permanent manner. At any rate, no kind of preferment 
fell to his lot, and the anarchy of the " foolish Ishbosheth " 
soon made any such preferment extremely improbable. 
Before long it would appear that Dryden had definitely 
given up whatever position he held in Sir Gilbert Pick- 
ering's household, and had betaken himself to literature. 
The fact of his so betaking himself almost implied adhe- 
rence to the royalist party. In the later years of the Com- 
monwealth, English letters had rallied to a certain extent 
from the disarray into which they were thrown by the 
civil war, but the centres of the rally belonged almost ex- 
clusively to the royalist party. Milton had long forsworn 
pure literature, to devote himself to official duties with an 
occasional personal polemic as a relief. Marvell and 
Wither, the two other chief lights of the Puritan party, 
could hardly be regarded by any one as men of light and 
loading, despite the really charming lyrics which both of 
them had produced. All the other great literary names 
of the time were, without exception, on the side of the 
exile. Hobbes was a royalist, though a somewhat singular 
one ; Cowley was a royalist ; Herrick was a royalist, so was 
Denham ; so was, as far as he was anything, the unstable 
Waller. Moreover, the most practically active aut " ^ 
the day, the one man of letters who combined the 



i] BEFORE THE RESTORA'^riON. W' 

of oi'2;anizing literary effort with the power of himself 
producing literary work of merit, was- one of the staunchest' 
of the kino-'s friends. Sir William jDavenant, without -anf- 
political concession, had somehow o'btained leave from th4^ 
republican government to reintrod;ace theatrical entertain-' 
ments of a kind, and moderate ra'yalists, like Evelyn, \titli' 
an interest in literature and the arts and sciences, were re^I 
turning to their homes and looking out for the good time'"' ] 
coroino-. That Dryden, upder these circumstances, having^/ 
at ihe time a much more vivid interest in literature thaTi*| 
in politics, and belonging as he did rather to the Presby-*l 
terian faction, who were everywhere returning to the r6y*<l 
alist political faith, than to the Independent republicans,! 
should become royahst in principle, was nothing surprising.^ 
Those who reproach him with the change (if change it 
was) forget that he shared it with the immense majonty ' 
of the nation. For the last half-century the literary cur- 
rent has been so entirely on the Puritan side that we are- 
probably in danger of doing at least as much injustice to'^ 
the royalists as was at one time done to their opponents. • 
One thing in particular I have never seen fairly put as ae- ; 
counting for the complete ^oyalization of nearly the whole -^ 
people, and it is a thing which has a special bearing dii'^ 
Dryden. It has been said that his temperament w?ts^" 
specially and exceptionally English. Now one of the most 
respectable, if not the most purely rational features of the 
English character, is its objection to wanton bloodshed 
for political causes, without form of law. It was this, be- 
yond all question, that alienated the English from James 
the Second ; it was this that in the heyday of Hanoverian 
power made them turn a cold shoulder on the Duke of 
Cumberland; it was this which enlisted them almost ate"' 
one man against the French revolutionists; it was this 



l^v DRYDEN. [cHAh 

■wiiicli brought about' in our own days a political move- 
i|ient to which there iis no need to refer more particular- 
ly. Now, it must be remembered that, either as the losing 
party or for other reasons, the royalists were in the great 
civil war almost free from the charge of reckless blood- 
shedding. Their troopi^ were disorderly, and given to 
plunder, but not to cruelty. No legend even charges 
against Astley or Goring, against Rupert or Lunsford, any- 
thing like the Drogheda massacre — the effect of which on 
the general mind Defoe, an unexceptionable witness, has 
preserved by a chance phrase in Robinson Crusoe — or the 
hideous bloodbath of the Irishw^oraen after Naseby, or the 
brutal butchery of Dr. Hudson at Woodcroft, in Dryden's 
own county, where the soldiers chopped off the priest's 
fingers as he clung to the gurgoyles of the tower, and 
thrust him back with pikes into the moat which, mutilated 
as he was, he had managed to swim. A certain humanity 
and absence of bloodthirstiness are among Dryden's most 
creditable characteristics,^ and these excesses of fanaticism 
are not at all unlikely to have had their share in determin- 
ing; him to adopt the winning side when at last it won. 
Bat it is perhaps more to the purpose that his literary lean- 
ings must of themselves have inevitably inclined him in the 
same direction. There was absolutely no opening for lit- 
erature on the republican side, a fact of which no better 

^ The too famous Political Prologues may, perhaps, be quoted 
against me here. I have only to remark : first, that, bad as they are, 
they form an infinitesimal portion of Dryden's work, and are in glar- 
ing contrast with the sentiments pervading that work as a whole ; 
secondly, that they were written at a time of political excitement un- 
paralleled in history, save once at Athens and once or twice at Paris. 
But I cannot help adding that their denouncers usually seem to me 
to be at least partially animated by the notion that Dryden wished 
the wrong people to be hanged. 



I.] BEFORE THE RlJSTORA^ION". 15 

proof can be afforded tliaii tlie small salarW at which the 
first man of letters then living was hired bjr a government 
which, whatever faults it had, certainly did hot sin by re- 
warding its other servants too meagrely. That Dryden at 
this time had any deep-set theological or political preju- 
dices is very improbable. He certainly had riot, like But- 
ler, noted for years the faults and weaknesses of? the domi- 
nant party, so as to enshrine them in immortal ridicule 
when the time should come. But he was evidently ; an 
ardent devotee of literature ; he was not averse to the 
pleasures of the town, which if not so actively interfered 
with by the Commonwealth as is sometimes thought, were 
certainly not encouraged by it; and his friends and asso- 
ciates must have been royalists almost to a man. So he 
threw himself at once on that side when the chance came, 
and had probably thrown himself there in spirit some 
time before. The state of the literature in which he thus 
took service must be described before we go any farther. 

The most convenient division of literature is into poetry, 
drama, and prose. With regard to poetry, the reigning 
style at the advent of Dryden was, as everybody knows, 
the peculiar style unfortunately baptized as " metaphysi- 
cal." The more catholic criticism of the last 100 years 
has disembarrassed this poetry of much of the odium 
which once hung round it, without, however, doing full I 
justice to its merits. In Donne, especially, the king of the,' 
school, the conceits and laboured fancies which distinguish 
it frequently reach a hardly surpassed height of poetical 
beauty. When Donne speculates as to the finding on the 
body of his dead lover 

"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone," 
when he tells us how — 



16 DRYCEX. [cHA- 

" I long ta. talk with, some old lover's ghost, 
Who di/ed before the god of love was born ;" 



the effect is tljiat of summer lightning on a dark nio-ht 
suddenly exposing unsuspected realms of fantastic and 
poetical suggestion. But at its worst the school was cer- 
tainly bad enpugh, and its badnesses had already been ex- 
hibited by pryden with considerable felicity in his poem 
on Lord Hastings and the small - pox. I really do not 
know that/ in all Johnson's carefully picked specimens in 
his life of/' Cowley, a happier absurdity is to be found than 

" Each little pimple had a tear in it, 
To wail the fault its rising did commit." 

Of such a school as this, though it lent itself more direct- 
ly than is generally thought to the unequalled oddities 
of Butler, little good in the way of serious poetry could 
come. On the other hand, the great romantic school was 
practically over, and Milton, its last survivor, was, as has 
been said, in a state of poetical eclipse. There was, there- 
fore growing up a kind of school of good sense in poetry, 
of which Waller, Denham, Cowley, and Davenant were the 
chiefs. Waller derives most of his fame from his lyrics, 
inferior as these are to those of Herrick and Carew. Cow- 
ley was a metaphysician with a strong hankering after 
something different. Denham, having achieved one ad- 
mirable piece of versification, had devoted himself chiefly 
to doggrel ; but Davenant, though perhaps not so good a 
poet as any of the three, was a more living influence. His 
early works, especially his dirge on Shakspeare and his 
exquisite lines to the Queen, are of the best stamp of the 
older school. His Gondihert, little as it is now^ read, and 
unsuccessful as the quatrain in which it is written must al- 
ways be for a very long work, is better than any long nar- 



I.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 17 

rative poem, for many a year before and after. Both Lis 
poetical and his dramatic activity (of vvliich more anon) 
were incessant, and were ahnost always exerted in the di- 
rection of innovation. But the real importance of these 
four writers was the help they gave to the development of 
the heroic couplet, the predestined common form of poetry 
of the more important kind for a century and a half to 
come. The heroic couplet was, of course, no novelty in 
English ; but it had hitherto been only fitfully patronized 
for poems of length, and had not been adapted for general 
use. *The whole structure of the decasyllabic line before 
the middle of the seventeenth century was ill calculated 
for the perfecting of the couplet. Accustomed either to 
the stately plainness of blank verse, or to the elaborate in- 
tricacies of the stanza, writers had got into the habit of 
communicating to their verse a slow and somewhat lan- 
guid movement. The satiric poems in which the couplet 
had been most used were, either by accident or design, 
couched in the roughest possible verse, so rough that in 
the hands of Marston and Donne it almost ceased to be 
capable of scansion. In general, the couplet had two 
drawbacks. Either it was turned by means of enjamhe- 
ments into something very like rhythmic prose, with 
rhymes straying about at apparently indefinite intervals, 
or it was broken up into a staccato motion by the neglect 
to support and carry on the rhythm at the termination 
of the distichs. All the four poets mentioned, especially 
the three first, did much to fit the couplet for miscellane- 
ous work. All of them together, it is hardly needful to 
say, did not do so much as the young Cambridge man 
who, while doing bookseller's work for Herringman the 
publisher, hanging about the coffee-houses, and planning 
plays with Davenant and Sir Robert Howard, was wait- 
2 



DRYDEN. [cHA?. 



incr for opportunity and impulse to help him to make 
his way. 

The drama was in an even more critical state than 
poetry pure and simple, and here Davenant was the im- 
portant person. All the giant race except Shirley were 
dead, and Shirley had substituted a kind of tragedie bour- 
geoise for the work of his masters. Other practitioners 
chiefly favoured the example of one of the least imitable 
of those masters, and out -forded Ford in horrors of all 
kinds, while the comedians clung still more tightly to the 
humour-comedy of Jonson. Davenant himself had made 
abundant experiments — experiments, let it be added, some- 
times of no small merit — in both these styles. But the 
occupations of tragedy and comedy were gone, and the 
question was how to find a new one for them. Davenant 
succeeded in procuring permission from the Protector, 
who, like most Englishmen of the time, was fond of music, 
to give what would now be called entertainments; and the 
entertainments soon developed into something like regu- 
lar stage plays. But Shakspeare's godson, with his keen 
manager's appreciation of the taste of the public, and his 
travelled experience, did not content himself with deviating 
cautiously into the old paths. He it was who, in the Siege 
of Rhodes, introduced at once into England the opera, and 
a less long-lived but, in a literary point of view, more im- 
portant variety, the heroic play, the latter of which always 
retained some tinge of the former. There are not many 
subjects on which, to put it plainly, more rubbish has been 
talked than the origin of the heroic play. Very few Eng- 
lishmen have ever cared to examine accurately the connex- 
ion between this singular growth and the classical tragedy 
already flourishing in France ; still fewer have ever cared 
to investigate the origins of that classical tragedy itself. 



I.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 19 

The blundering attribution of Dryden and bis rivals to 
Corneille and Racine, the more blundering attribution of 
Corneille and Racine to the Scudery romance (as if some- 
body should father Shelley on Monk Lewis), has been gen- 
erally accepted without much hesitation, though Dryden 
himself has pointed out that there is but little connexion 
between the French and the English drama; and though 
the history of the French drama itself is perfectly intelligi- 
ble, and by no means difficult to trace. The French clas- 
sical drama is the direct descendant of the drama of Sen- 
eca, first imitated by Jodelle and Gamier in the days of 
the PUiade ; nor did it ever quit that model, though in 
the first thirty years of the seventeenth century something 
was borrowed from Spanish sources. The English heroic 
drama, on the other hand, which Davenant invented, which 
Sir Robert Howard and Lord Orrery made fashionable, and 
for which Dryden achieved a popularity of nearly twenty 
years, was one of the most cosmopolitan — I had almost 
said the most mongrel — of literary productions. It adopt- 
ed the English freedom of action, multiplicity of character, 
and licence of stirring scenes acted coram populo. It bor- 
rowed lyrical admixture from Italy ; exaggerated and bom- 
bastic language came to it from Spain ; and to France it 
owed little more than its rhymed dialogue, and perhaps 
something of its sighs and flames. The disadvantages of 
rhyme in dramatic writing seem to modern Englishmen 
so great, that they sometimes find it difficult to understand 
how any rational being could exchange the blank verse 
of Shakspeare for the rhymes of Dryden, much more for 
the rhymes of his contemporaries and predecessors. But 
this omits the important consideration that it was not the 
blank verse of Shakspeare or of Fletcher that was thus 
exchanged. In the three-quarters of a century, or there- 



20 DRYDEN. [chap. 

abouts, which elapsed between the beginning of the great 
dramatic era and the Restoration, the chief vehicle of the 
drama had degenerated full as much as the drama itself; 
and the blank verse of the plays subsequent to Ford is of 
anything but Shakspearian quality — is, indeed, in many 
cases such as is hardly to be recognised for verse at all. 
Between this awkward and inharmonious stuff and the 
comparatively polished and elegant couplets of the inno- 
vators there could be little comparison, especially when 
Dryden had taken up the couplet himself. 

Lastly, in prose the time was pretty obviously calling 
for a reform. There were great masters of English prose 
living when Dryden joined the literary world of London, 
but there- was no generally accepted style for the journey- 
work of literature. Milton and Taylor could arrange the 
most elaborate symphonies ; Hobbes could write with a 
crabbed cleai;ness as lucid almost as the flowing sweetness 
of Berkeley ; but these were- exceptions. The endless sen- 
tences out of which Clarendon is wont just to save him- 
self, when his readers are wondering whether breath and 
brain will last out their involution ; the hopeless coils of 
parenthesis and afterthought in which Cromwell's speech 
lay involved, till Mr. Carlyle was sent on a special mission 
to disentangle them, show the dangers and difficulties of 
the ordinary prose style of the day. It was terribly cum- 
bered about quotations, which it introduced with merciless 
frequency. It had no notion of a unit of style in the sen- 
tence. It indulged, without the slightest hesitation, in ev- 
ery detour and involution of second thoughts and by-the- 
way qualifications. So far as any models were observed, 
those models were chiefly taken from the inflected lan- 
guages of Greece and Rome, where the structural altera- 
tions of the words according to their grammatical con- 



I.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 21 

nexion are for the most part sufficient to make the mean- 
ing tolerably clear. Nothing so much as the lack of in- 
flexions saved our prose at this time from sharing the fate 
of German, and involving itself almost beyond the reach 
of extrication. The common people, when not bent upon 
fine language, could speak and write clearly and straight- 
forwardly, as Banyan's works show to this day to all who 
care to read. But scholars and divines deserved much less 
well of their mother tongue. It may, indeed, be said that 
prose w^as infinitely worse off than poetry. In the latter 
there had been an excellent style, if not one perfectly suited 
for all ends, and it had degenerated. In the former, noth- 
ing like a general prose style had ever yet been elaborated 
at all ; what had been done had been done chiefly in the 
big-bow-wow manner, as Dryden's editor might have called 
it. For light miscellaneous work, neither fantastic nor 
solemn, the demand was only just being created. Cowley, 
indeed, wrote well, and, comparatively speaking, elegantly, 
but his prose work was small in extent and little read in 
comparison to his verse. Tillotson was Dryden's own 
contemporary, and hardly preceded him in the task of 
reform. 

From this short notice it will be obvious that the gen- 
eral view, according to which a considerable change took 
place and was called for at the Restoration, is correct, not- 
withstanding the attempts recently made to prove the con- 
trary by a learned writer. Professor Masson's lists of men 
of letters and of the dates of their publication of their 
works prove, if he will pardon my saying so, nothing. 
The actual spirit of the time is to be judged not from the 
production of works of writers who, as they one by one 
dropped off, left no successors, bat from those who struck 
root downwards and blossomed upwards in the general 



22 DRYDEN. [chap. i. 

literary soil. Milton is not a writer of the Restoration, 
though his greatest works appeared after it, and though he 
sui*vived it nearly fifteen years. Nor was Taylor, nor Claren- 
don, nor Cowley : hardly even Davenant, or Waller, or But- 
ler, or Denhara. The writers of the Restoration are those 
whose works had the seeds of life in them ; who divined 
or formed the popular tastes of the period, who satisfied 
that taste, and who trained up successors to prosecute and 
modify their own work. The interval between the prose 
and the poetry of Dryden and the prose and the poetry of 
Milton is that of an entire generation, notwithstanding the 
manner in which, chronologically speaking, they overlap. 
The objects which the reformer, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, set before him have been suflSciently indicated. 
It must be the task of the following chapters to show 
how and to what extent he effected a reform ; what the 
nature of that reform was ; what was the value of the work 
which in effecting it he contributed to the literature of his 
couniry. 



CHAPTER II. 

EARLY LITERARY WORK. 

The ^foregoing chapter will have already shown the chief 
difficulty of writing a life of Dryden — the almost entire 
absence of materials. At the Restoration the poet was 
nearly thirty years old ; and of positive information as to 
his life during these thirty years we have half-a-dozen 
dates, the isolated fact of his mishap at Trinity, a single 
letter and three poems, not amounting in all to three hun- 
dred lines. Nor can it be said that even subsequently, 
during his forty years of fame and literary activity, posi- 
tive information as to his life is plentiful. His works are 
still the best life of him, and in so far as a biography of 
Dryden is filled with any matter not purely literary, it 
must for the most part be filled with controversy as to his 
political and religious opinions and conduct rather than 
with accounts of his actual life and conversation. Omit- 
ting for the present literary work, tlie next fact that we 
have to record after the Restoration is one of some impor- 
tance, though as before the positive information obtaina- 
ble in connexion with it is but scanty. On the 1st of De- 
cember, 1663, Dryden was married at St. Swithin's Church. 
to Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of 
Berkshire. 

This marriage, like most of the scanty events of Dry- 



24 DliYDEN. [chap. 

den's life, Las been made the occasion of much and unnec- 
essary controversy. The libellers of the Popish Plot dis- 
turbances twenty years later declared that the character 
of the bride was doubtful, and that her brothers had acted 
towards Dryden in somewhat the same way as the Hamil- 
tons did towards Gramraont. A letter of hers to the Earl 
of Chesterfield, which was published about half a century 
ago, has been used to support the first charge, besides 
abundant arguments as to the unlikelihood of an earl's 
daughter marrying a poor poet for love. It is one of the 
misfortunes of prominent men that when fact is silent 
about their lives fiction is always busy. If we brush away 
the cobwebs of speculation, there is nothing in the least 
suspicious about this matter. Lord Berkshire had a large 
family and a small property. Dryden himself was, as we 
have seen, well born and well connected. That some of 
his sisters had married tradesmen seems to Scott likely to 
have been shocking to the Howards ; but he must surely 
have forgotten the famous story of the Earl of Bedford's 
objection to be raised a step in the peerage because it 
would make it awkward for the younger scions of the 
house of Russell to go into trade. The notion of an ab- 
solute severance between Court and City at that time is 
one of the many unhistorical fictions which have somehow 
or other obtained currency. Dryden was already an inti- 
mate friend of Sir Robert Howard, if not also of the other 
brother, Edward, and perhaps it is not unnoteworthy that 
Lady Elizabeth was five-and-twenty, an age in those days 
somewhat mature, and one at which a young lady would 
be thought wise by her family in accepting any creditable 
offer. As to the Chesterfield letter, the evidence it con- 
tains can only satisfy minds pi-eviously made up. It tes- 
tifies certainly to something liko a flirtation, and suggests 



II.] EAKLY LITERARY WORK. 25 

an interview, but there is nothing in it at all compromis- 
ing. The libels already mentioned are perfectly vague and 
wholly untrustworthy. 

It seems, though on no very definite evidence, that the 
marriage was not altogether a happy one. Dryden ap- 
pears to have acquired some small property in Wiltshire ; 
perhaps also a royal grant which was made to Lady Eliz- 
abeth in recognition of her father's services ; and Lord 
Berkshire's Wiltshire house of Charlton became a country 
retreat for the poet. But his wife was, it is said, ill-tem- 
pered and not overburdened with brains, and he himself 
was probably no more a model of conjugal propriety than 
most of his associates. I say probably, for here, too, it is 
astonishino; how the evidence breaks down when it is ex- 
aniined, or rather how it vanishes altogether into air. Mr. 
J. R. Green has roundly informed the world that " Dryden's 
life was that of a libertine, and his marriage with a woman 
who was yet more dissolute than himself only gave a new 
spur to his debaucheries." We have seen what foundation 
there is for this gross charge against Lady Elizabeth ; now 
let us see what ground there is for the charge against Dry- 
den. There are the libels of Shadwell and the rest of the 
crew^, to which not even Mr. Christie, a very severe judge 
of Dryden's moral character, assigns the slightest weight ; 
there is the immorality ascribed to Bayes in the Rehearsal^ 
a very pretty piece of evidence indeed, seeing that Bayes 
is a confused medley of half-a-dozen persons ; there is a 
general association by tradition of Dryden's name with 
that of Mrs. Reeve, a beautiful actress of the day; and 
finally there is a tremendous piece of scandal which is the 
battle-horse of the devil's advocates. A curious letter ap- 
peared in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1745, the author 
of which is unknown, though conjectures, as to which 
C 2* 



26 DRYDEX. [chap. 

there are difficulties, identify liiin vvitb Dryden's youthful 
friend Southern. " I remember," says this person, " plain 
John Dryden, before he paid his court with success to 
the great, in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I 
have ate tarts with him and Madam Reeve at the Mul- 
berry Garden, when our author advanced to a sw^ord and 
a Chedreux wig." Perhaps there is no more curious in- 
stance of the infinitesimal foundation on which scandal 
builds than this matter of Dryden's immorality. Putting 
aside mere vague libellous declamation, the one piece of 
positive information on the subject that we have is anon- 
ymous, was made at least seventy years after date, and 
avers that John Dryden, a dramatic author, once ate tarts 
with an actress and a third person. This translated into 
the lano-uao'e of Mr. Green becomes the dissoluteness of a 
libertine, spurred up to new debaucheries. 

It is immediately after the marriage that we have almost 
our first introduction to Dryden as a live man seen by live 
human beino-s. And the circumstances of this introduc- 
tion are characteristic enougb. On the 3rd of February, 
1664, Pepys tells us that he stopped, as he was going to 
fetch his wife, at the great coffee-house in Covent Garden, 
and there he found " Dryden, the poet I knew at Cam- 
bridge," and all the wits of the town. The company 
pleased Pepys, and he made a note to the effect that " it 
will be good coming thither." But the most interesting 
thing is this glimpse, first, of the associates of Dryden at 
the university ; secondly, of his installation at Will's, the 
famous house of call, where he was later to reign as undis- 
puted monarch ; and, thirdly, of the fact that he was al- 
ready recognised as " Dryden the poet." The remainder 
of the present chapter will best be occupied by pointing 
out what he had done, and in brief space afterwards did 



II.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. 2\ 

do, to earn that title, reserviug the important subject of 
his dramatic activity, which also began about this time, 
for separate treatment. 

The lines on the death of Lord Hastings, and the lines 
to Hoddesdon, have, it has been said, a certain promise 
about them to experienced eyes, but it is of that kind of 
promise which, as the same experience teaches, is at least 
as often followed by little performance as by much. The 
lines on Cromwell deserve less faint praise. The following 
stanzas exhibit at once the masculine strength and origi- 
naltty which were to be the poet's great sources of power, 
and the habit of conceited and pedantic allusion which he 
had cauo:ht from the fashions of the time : 

" Swift and resistless through the land he passed, 
Like that bold Greek who did the East subdue, 
And made to battle such heroic haste 
As if on wings of victory he flew. 

" He fought secure of fortune as of fame, 

Till by new maps the island might be shown 
Of conquests, which he strewed where'er he came, 
Thick as the galaxy with stars is sown. 

" His palms, though under weights they did not stand, 

Still thrived ; no winter did his laurels fade. 

Heaven in his portrait showed a workman's hand, 

And drew it perfect, yet without a shade. 
W(>{{h o^ 

, ** Peace was the prize of all his toil and care, 

Which war had banished, and did now restore : 

Bologna's walls so mounted in the air 

To seat themselves more surely than before." 

An impartial contemporary critic, if he could have an- 
ticipated the methods of a later school of criticism, might 
have had some difficulty in deciding whether the masterly 
plainness, directness, and vigour of the best lines here ought 



28 DRYDEN. [chap. 

or oQglit not to excuse the conceit about the palms and the 
weights, and the fearfully far-fetched piece of fancy histo- 
ry about Bologna. Such a critic, if he had had the better 
part of discretion, would have decided in the affirmative. 
There were not three poets then living who could have 
written the best lines of the Heroic Stanzas, and what is 
more, those lines were not in the particular manner of 
either of the poets who, as far as general poetical merit 
goes, might have written them. But the Restoration, 
which for reasons given already I must hold to have been 
genuinely welcome to Dryden, and not a mere occasion of 
profitable coat-turning, brought forth some much less am- 
biguous utterances. Astrcea Redux (1660), a panegyric 
on the coronation (1661), a poem to Lord Clarendon 
(1662), a few still shorter pieces of the complimentary 
kind to Dr. Charleton (1663), to the Duchess of York 
(1665), and to Lady Castlemaine (166-?), lead up to An- 
nus Mirahilis at the beginning of 1667, the crowning ef- 
fort of Drj'^den's first poetical period, and his last before 
the long absorption in purely dramatic occupations which 
lasted till the Popish Plot and its controversies evoked 
from him the expression of hitherto unsuspected powers. 

These various pieces do not amount in all to more than 
two thousand lines, of which nearly two-thirds belong to 
Annus Mirahilis. But they were fully sufficient to show 
that a new poetical power had arisen in the land, and their 
qualities, good and bad, might have justified the anticipa- 
tion that the writer would do better and better work as he 
grew older. All the pieces enumerated, with the exception 
of Annus Mirahilis, are in the heroic couplet, and their 
versification is of such a kind that the relapse into the 
quatrain in the longer poem is not a little surprising. But 
nothing is more characteristic of Dryden than the extreme- 



u.] EARLY LITERAEY WORK. 29 

ly tentative character of his work, and he had doubtless not 
yet satisfied himself that the couplet was suitable for nar- 
rative poems of any length, notwithstanding the mastery 
over it which he must have known himself to have attain- 
ed in his short pieces. The very first lines of Astrcea Re- 
dux show this mastery clearly enough. 

" Now with a general peace the world was blest, 
While ours, a world divided from the rest, 
A dreadful quiet felt, and worser far 
Than arms, a sullen interval of war." 

Here is already the energy divine for which the author 
was to be famed, and, in the last line at least, an instance 
of the varied cadence and subtly - disposed music which 
were, in his hands, to free the couplet from all charges of 
monotony and tameness. But almost immediately there 
is a falling off. The poet goes off into an unnecessary 
simile preceded by the hackneyed and clumsy " thus," a 
simile quite out of place at the opening of a poem, and 
disfigured by the too famous, " an horrid stillness first in- 
vades the ear," which if it has been extravagantly blamed 
— and it seems to me that it has — certainly will go near 
to be thouo-ht a conceit. But we have not long to wait 
for another chord that announces Dryden : 

" For his long absence Church and State did groan. 
Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne. 
Experienced age in deep despair was lost ^ 

To see the rebel thrive, the loyal crost. 
Youth, that with joys had unacquainted been, 
Envied grey hairs that once good days had seen. 
We thought our sires, not with their own content, 
Had, ere we came to age, our portion spent." 

Whether the matter of this is suitable for poetry or not is 



80 DRYDEN. [chap. 

one of those questions on which doctors will doubtless 
disagree to the end of the chapter. But even when we 
look back through the long rows of practitioners of the 
couplet who have succeeded Drjden, we shall, I think, 
hardly find one who is capable of such masterly treatment 
of the form, of giving to the phrase a turn at once so clear 
and so individual, of weighting the verse with such dignity, 
and at the same time winging it with such lightly flying 
speed. The poem is injured by numerous passages in- 
troduced by the usual " as " and " thus " and " like," which 
were intended for ornaments, and which in fact simply 
disfigure. It is here and there charged, after the manner 
of the day, with inappropriate and clumsy learning, and 
with doubtful Latinisms of expression. But it is redeemed 
by such lines as — 

" When to be God's anointed was his crime ;" 

as the characteristic gibe at the Covenant insinuated by 
the description of the Guisean League — 

" As holy and as Catholic as ours ;" 

as the hit at the 

" Polluted nest 
Whence legion twice before was dispossest ;" 

as the splendid couplet on the British Amphitrite — 

" Proud her returning prince to entertain 
With the submitted fasces of the main." 

Such lines as these must have had for the readers of 1660 
the attraction of a novelty which only very careful stu- 
dents of the literature of the time can understand now. 
The merits of Astrcea Redux must of course not be judged 
by the reader's acquiescence in its sentiments. But let 



II.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. 31 

any one read the following passage without thinking of 
the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer, of Madam 
Carwell's twelve thousand a year, and Lord Russell's scaf- 
fold, and he assuredly will not fail to recognise their beauty : 

" Methinks I see those crowds on Dover's strand, 
Who in their haste to welcome you to land 
Choked up the beach with their still-growing store, 
And made a wilder torrent on the shore : 
While, spurred with eager thoughts of past delight. 
Those who had seen you court a second sight, 
Preventing still your steps, and making haste 
To meet you often wheresoe'er you past. 
How shall I speak of that triumphant day 
When you renewed the expiring pomp of May ? 
A month that owns an interest in your name ; 
You and the flowers are its peculiar claim. 
That star, that at your birth shone out so bright 
It stained the duller sun's meridian light. 
Did once again its potent fires renew, 
Guiding our eyes to find and worship you." 

The extraordinary art with which the recurrences of the 
you and your — in the circumstances naturally recited with 
a little stress of the voice — are varied in position so as to 
give a corresponding variety to the cadence of the verse, is 
perhaps the chief thing to be noted here. But a compari- 
son with even the best couplet verse of the time will show 
many other excellences in it. I am aware that this style 
of minute criticism has gone out of fashion, and that the 
variations of the position of a pronoun have terribly little 
to do with " criticism of life ;'^, but as I am dealing with 
a great English author whose main distinction is to have 
reformed the whole formal part of English prose and Eng- 
glish poetry, I must, once for all, take leave to follow the 
only road open to me to show what he actually did. 



32 DRYDEN. [cfiAP. 

The otlier smaller conplet-poems which have been men- 
tioned are less important than Astrcea Hedux, not mevelj 
in point of size, but because they are later in date. The 
piece on the coronation, however, contains lines and pas- 
sages equal to any in the longer poem, and it shows very 
happily the modified form of conceit which Dry den, 
throughout his life, was fond of employing, and which, 
employed with his judgment and taste, fairly escapes the 
charges usually brought against " Clevelandisms," while it 
helps to give to the heroic the colour and picturesqueness 
which after the days of Pope it too often lacked. Such 
is the fancy about the postponement of the ceremony — 

" Had greater haste these sacred rites prepared, 
Some guilty months had in our triumph shared. 
But this untainted year is all your own, 
Your glories may without our crimes be shown." 

And such an exceedingly fine passage in the poem to 
Clarendon, which is one of the most finished pieces of 
Dryden's early versification — 

" Our setting sun from his declining seat 
Shot beams of kindness on you, not of heat : 
And, when his love was bounded in a few 
That were unhappy that they might be true, 
Made you the favourite of his last sad times ; 
That is, a sufferer in his subjects' crimes : 
Thus those first favours you received were sent, 
Like Heaven's rewards, in earthly punishment. 
Yet Fortune, conscious of your destiny, 
Even then took care to lay you softly by, 
And wrapt your fate among her precious things, 
Kept fresh to be unfolded with your King's. 
Shown all at once, you dazzled so our eyes 
As new-born Pallas did the god's surprise; 



II.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. 33 

When, springing forth from Jove's new-closing wound, 
She struck the warUke spear into the ground ; 
Which sprouting leaves did suddenly enclose. 
And peaceful olives shaded as they rose." 

For once the mania for simile and classical allusion has 
not led the author astray here, but has furnished him with 
a very happy and legitimate ornament. The only fault 
in the piece is the use of " did," which Dryden never 
wholly discarded, and which is perhaps occasionally allow- 
able enough. 

The remaining poems require no very special remark, 
though all contain evidence of the same novel and un- 
matched mastery over the couplet and its cadence. The 
author, however, was giving himself more and more to the 
dramatic studies which will form the subject of the next 
chapter, and to the prose criticisms which almost from the 
first he associated with those studies. But the events of 
the year 1666 tempted him once more to indulge in non- 
dramatic work, and the poem of Annus Mirabilis was the 
result. It seems to have been written, in part at least, at 
Lord Berkshire's seat of Charlton, close to Malmesbury, 
and was prefaced by a letter to Sir Robert Howard. Dry- 
den appears to have lived at Charlton during the greater 
part of 1665 and 1666, the plague and fire years. He 
had been driven from London, not merely by dread of 
the pestilence, but by the fact that his ordinary occupation 
v>'as gone, owing to the closing of the play-houses, and he 
evidently occupied himself at Charlton with a good deal 
of literary work, including his essay on dramatic poetry, 
his play of the Maiden Queen^ and Annus Mirabilis itself. 
This last was published very early in 1667, and seems to 
have been successful. Pepys bought it on the 2nd of Feb- 
ruary, and was fortunately able to like it better than he did 



34 DRYDEN. [chap. 

Hudibras. " A very good poem," the Clerk of the Acts 
of the Navy writes it down. It may be mentioned in 
passing that during this same stay at Charlton Dryden's 
eldest son Charles was born. 

Annus Mirahilis consists of 304 quatrains on the Gon- 
dibert model, reasons for the adoption of which Dryden 
gives (not so forcibly, perhaps, as is usual with him) in the 
before-mentioned letter to his brother-in-law. He speaks of 
rhyme generally with less respect than he was soon to show, 
and declares that he has adopted the quatrain because he 
judges it *' more noble and full of dignity " than any other 
form he knows. The truth seems to be that he was still 
to a great extent under the influence of Davenant, and that 
Gondibert as yet retained sufficient prestige to make its 
stanza act as a not unfavourable advertisement of poems 
written in it. With regard to the nobility and dignity 
of this stanza, it may safely be said that Annus Mira- 
bilis itself, the best poem ever written therein, killed it by 
exposing its faults. It is, indeed, at least when the rhymes 
of the stanzas are unconnected, a very bad metre for the 
purpose ; for it is chargeable with more than the disjoint- 
edness of the couplet, without the possibility of relief; 
while, on the other hand, the quatrains have not, like the 
Spenserian stave or the ottava rima, sufficient bulk to form 
units in themselves, and to include within them varieties 
of harmony. Despite these drawbacks, however, Dryden 
produced a very fine poem in Annus Mirabilis, though I 
am not certain that even its best passages equal those 
cited from the couplet pieces. At any rate, in this poem 
the characteristics of the master in what may be called 
his poetical adolescence are displayed to the fullest extent. 
The weight and variety of his line, his abundance of illus- 
tration and fancy, his happy turns of separate phrase, and 



n.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. ..^ 

his singular faculty of bending to poetical uses the most 
refractory names and things, all make themselves fully felt 
here. On the other hand, there is still an undue tendency 
to conceit and exuberance of simile. The famous lines — 

"These fight like husbands, but like lovers those; 
These fain would keep, and those more fain enjoy ;" 

are followed in the next stanza by a most indubitably 
" metaphysical " statement that 

" Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, 

And some by aromatic splinters die." 

at 

This cannot be considered the happiest possible means of 
informing us that the Dutch fleet was laden with spices 
and magots. Such puerile fancies are certainly unworthy 
of a poet who could tell how 

" The mighty ghosts of our great Harrys rose 
And armed E(^wards looked with anxious eyes ;" 

and who, in the beautiful simile of the eagle, has equalled 
the Elizabethans at their own weapons. I cannot think, 
however, admirable as the poem is in its best passages (the 
description of the fire, for instance), that it is technically 
the equal of Astrcea Redux. The monotonous recurrence 
of the same identical cadence in each stanza — a recurrence 
which even Dryden's art was unable to prevent, and which 
can only be prevented by some such interlacements of 
rhymes and enjambements of sense as those which Mr. 
Swinburne has successfully adopted in Laus Veneris — in- 
jures the best passages. The best of all is undoubtedly 
the following : 

"In this deep quiet, from what source unknown. 
Those seeds of fire their fatal birth disclose ; 
And first few scattering sparks about were blown. 
Big with the flames that to our ruin rose. 



DRYDEN. [chap. 

" Then in some close-pent K^qin jit crept along, 
And, smouldering as it went, in silence fed ; 
Till the infant monster, with devouring strong. 
Walked boldly upright with exalted head. 

" Now, like some rich and mighty murderer, 

Too great for prison which he breaks with gold, 
Who fresher for new mischiefs does appear, 
And dares the world to tax him with the old. 

" So 'scapes the insulting fire his narrow jail. 
And makes small outlets into open air ; 
There the fierce winds his tender force assail, 
And beat him downward to his first i-epair. 

" The winds, like crafty courtesans, withheld 

His flames from burning but to blow them more ; 
And, every fresh attempt, he is repelled 
With faint denials, weaker than before. 

" And now, no longer letted of his prey, • 

He leaps up at it with enraged desire, 
O'erlooks the neighbours with a wide survey. 
And nods at every house his threatening fire. 

" The ghosts of traitors from the Bridge descend, 
With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice ; 
About the fire into a dance they bend 

And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice." 

The last stanza, indeed, contains a fine image finely ex- 
pressed, but I cannot but be glad that Dryden tried no 
more experiments with the recalcitrant quatrain. 

Annus Mirahilis closes the series of early poems, and 
for fourteen years from the date of its publication Dryden 
was known, with insignificant exceptions, as a dramatic 
writer only. But his efforts in poetry proper, though they 
had riot as yet resulted in any masterpiece, had), as I have 



11.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. 31 

endeavoured to point out, amply entitled him to the posi- 
tion of a great and original master of the formal part of 
poetry, if not of a poet who had distinctly found his way. 
He had carried out a conception of the couplet which was 
almost entirely new, having been anticipated only by some 
isolated and ill - sustained efforts. He had manifested an 
equal originality in the turn of his phrase, an extraordina- 
ry command of poetic imagery, and, above all, a faculty of 
handling by no means promising subjects in an indispu- 
tably poetical manner. Circumstances which I shall now 
procd^d to describe called him away from the practice of 
pure poetry, leaving to him, however, a reputation, amply 
deserved and acknowledged even by his enemies, of pos- 
sessing unmatched skill in versification. Nor were the 
studies upon which he now entered wholly alien to his 
proper function, though they were in some sort a bye- 
work. They strengthened his command over the lan- 
guage, increased his skill in verse, and, above all, tended 
by degrees to reduce and purify what was corrupt in his 
phraseology and system of ornamentation. Fourteen years 
of dramatic practice did more than turn out some admira- 
ble scenes and some even more admirable criticism. They 
acted as a filtering reservoir for his poetical povyers, so 
that the stream which, when it ran into them, w^as the 
turbid and rubbish - laden current . of Annus Mirahilis^ 
flowed out as impetuous, as strong, but clear and with- 
out base admixture, in the splendid verse of Absalom and 
Achitophel. 



CHAPTER III. 

PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 

There are not many portions of English literature which 
have been treated with greater severity by critics than the 
Restoration drama, and of the Restoration dramatists few 
have met with less favour, in proportion to their general 
literary eminence, than Dryden. Of his comedies, in par- 
ticular, few have been found to say a good word. His 
sturdiest champion, Scott, dismisses them as "heavy ;" Haz- 
litt, a defender of the Restoration comedy in general, finds 
little in them but " ribaldry and extravagance ;" and 1 have 
lately seen them spoken of with a shudder as "horrible." 
The trao'edies have fared better, but not much better ; and 
thus the remarkable spectacle is presented of a general 
condemnation, varied only by the faintest praise, of the 
work to which an admitted master of English devoted, 
almost exclusively, twenty years of the flower of his man- 
hood. So complete is the oblivion into which these dramas 
have fallen, that it has buried in its folds the always charm- 
ing and sometimes exquisite songs which they contain. 
Except in Congreve's two editions, and in the bulky edi- 
tion of Scott, Dry den's theatre is unattainable, and thus the 
majority of readers have but little opportunity of correct- 
ing, from individual study, the unfavourable impressions 
derived from the verdicts of the critics. For mvself, I am 



CHAP. III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 39 

very far frotn considering Dryden's dramatic work as on a 
level with his purely poetical work. But, as nearly always 
happens, and as happened, by a curious coincidence, in the 
case of his editor, the fact that he did something else much 
better has ohscured the fact that he did this thing in not 
a few instances very well. Scott's poems as poems are far 
inferior to his novels as novels ; Dryden's plays are far in- 
ferior as plays to his satires and his fables as poems. But 
both the poems of Scott and the plays of Dryden are a 
great deal better than the average critic admits. 

That dramatic work went somewhat against the grain 
with Dryden, is frequently asserted on his own authority, 
and is perhaps true. He began it, however, tolerably early, 
and had finished at least the scheme of a play (on a sub- 
ject which he afterwards resumed) shortly after the Resto- 
ration. As Soon as that event happened, a double in- 
centive to play-writing began to work upon him. It was 
much the most fashionable of literary occupations, and also 
much the most lucrative. Dryden was certainly not indif- 
ferent to fame, and, though he was by no means a covetous 
naan, he seems to have possessed at all times the perfect 
readiness to spend whatever could be honestly got which 
frequently distinguishes men of letters. He set to work 
accordingly, and produced in 1663 the Wild Gallant. We 
do not pos-soss this play in the form in which it was first 
acted and damned. Afterwards Lady Castlemaine gave it 
her protection; the author added certain attractions ac- 
cording to the taste of the time, and it was both acted and 
published. It certainly cannot be said to be a great suc- 
cess even as it is. Dryden had, like most of his fellows, 
atten^pted the Comedy of Humours, as it was called at 
the +ime, and as it continued to be, and to be called, till 
th« mot^ polished comedy of manners, or artificial comedy, 



40 DRYDEN. [chap. 

succeeded it, owing to the success of Wycherley, and still 
more of Congreve. The number of comedies of this kind 
written after 1620 is ver}'^ large, while the fantastic and 
poetical comedy of which Shakspeare and Fletcher had al- 
most alone the secret had almost entirelv died out. The 
merit of the Comedy of Humours is the observation of 
actual life which it requires in order to be done well, and 
the consequent fidelity .with which it holds up the muses' 
looking-glass (to use the title of one of Randolph's plays) 
to nature. Its defects are its proneness to descend into 
farce, and the temptation which it gives to the writer to 
aim rather at mere fragmentary and sketchy delineations 
than at finished composition. At the Restoration this 
school of drama was vigorously enough' represented by 
Davenant himself, by Sir Aston Cokain, and by Wilson, a 
writer of great merit who rather unaccountably abandoned 
the stage very soon, while in a year or two Shadwell, the 
actor Lacy, and several others were to take it up aiid carry 
it on. It had frequently been combined with the embroil- 
ed and complicated plots of the Spanish comedy of intrigue, 
the adapters usually allowing these plots to conduct them- 
selves much more irregularly than was th^ case in the 
originals, while the deficiencies were made u^^W' supposed 
to be made up, by a liberal allowance of " hurnours.'' The 
danger of this sort of work was perhaps never better illiils- 
trated than by Shadwell, when he boasted in one of his 
prefaces that " four of the humours were entirely new," 
and appeared to consider this a sufficient claim' to respect- 
ful reception. Dryden in his first play fell to the fullest 
extent into the blunder of this combined Spanish-English 
style, though on no subsequent occasion did he i^epeat 
the mistake. By degrees the example and influence 6i 
Moliere sent complicated plots and " humours " alik^ oil 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 41 

of fashion, though the national taste and temperament 
■were too strongly in favour of the latter to allow them to 
be totally banished. In our very best plays of the so-call- 
ed artificial style, such as Love for Love^ and the master- 
pieces of Sheridan, character sketches to which Ben Jonson 
himself would certainly not refuse the title of humours 
appear, and contribute a large portion of the interest. 
Dryden, however, was not likely to anticipate this better 
time, or even to distinguish himself in the older form of 
the humour-comedy. He had little aptitude for the odd 
and.i^uaint, nor had he any faculty of devising or picking 
up strokes of extravagance, such as those which his enemy 
Shadwell could command, though he could make no very 
good use of them. The humours of Trice and Bibber 
and Lord Nonsuch in the Wild Gallant are forced and 
too often feeble, though there arc flashes here and there, 
especially in the part of Sir Timorous, a weakling of the 
tribe of Aguecheek; but in this first attempt, the one 
situation and the one pair of characters which Dryden 
was to treat with tolerable success are already faintly 
sketched. In Constance and Loveby, the pair of light- 
hearted lovers who carry on a flirtation without too much 
modesty certainly, and with a remarkable absence of re- 
finement, but at the same time with some genuine affec- 
tion for one another, and in a hearty, natural manner, 
make their first appearance. It is to be noted in Dryden's 
favour that these lovers of his are for the most part free 
from the charge of brutal heartlessness and cruelty, which 
has been justly brought against those of Etherege, of 
Wycherley, and, at least in the case of the Old Bachelor, 
of Congreve. The men are rakes, and rather vulgar rakes, 
but they are nothing worse. The women have too many 
of the characteristics of Charles the Second's maids of 
D 3 



42 DRYDEN. [chap. 

honour ; but they have at the same time a certain health- 
iness and sweetness of the older days, which bring them, 
if not close to Rosalind and Beatrice, at any rate pretty 
near to Fletcher's heroines, such as Dorothea and Mary. 
Still, the Wild Gallant can by no possibility be called a 
good play. It was followed at no long interval by the 
Rival Ladies, a tragicomedy, which is chiefly remarkable 
for containing some heroic scenes in rhyme, for imitating 
closely the tangled and improbable plot of its Spanish 
original, for being tolerably decent,, and I fear it must 
be added, for being intolerably dull. The third venture 
was in every way more important. The Indian Emper- 
or (1665) was Dry den's first original play, his first heroic 
play, and indirectly formed part of a curious literary dis- 
pute, one of many in which he was engaged, but which 
in this case proved fertile in critical studies of his best 
brand. Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's brother-in-law, had, 
wHh the assistance of Dryden himself, produced a play 
called the Ijadiaji^^^ueen, and to this the Indian Emper- 
or was nominally a sequel. But as Dryden remarks, with ^ 
a quaintness which may or may not be satirical, the con- 
clusion of the Indian Queen " left but little matter to 
build upon, there remaining but two of the considerable 
characters alive." The good Sir Robert had indeed heap- 
ed the stage with dead in his last act in a manner which' 
must have confirmed any French critic who saw or read 
the play in his belief of the bloodthirstiness of the Eng- 
lish drama. The field was thus completely clear, and 
Dryden, retaining only Montezuma as his hero, used his 
own fancy and invention without restraint in constructing 
the plot and arranging the characters. The play was ex- 
tremely popular, and it divides with Tyrannic Love and the 
Conquest of Granada the merit of being the best of all 



in.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 43 

EngHsli heroic plays. The origin of that singular growth 
has been already given, and there is no need to repeat the 
story, while the Conquest of Granada is so much more the 
model play of the style, that anything like an analysis of a 
heroic play had better be reserved for this. The Indian 
Emioeror was followed, in 1667, by the Maiden Queen, a 
tragicomedy. The tragic or heroic part is very inferior 
to its predecessor, but the comic part has merits which are 
by no means inconsiderable. Celadon and Florimel are 
the first finished specimens of that pair of practitioners of 
light-o' love flirtation which was Dryden's sole contribu- 
tion of any valye to the comic stage. Charles gave the 
play particular commendation, and called it " his play," as 
Dryden takes care to tell us. Still, in the same year came 
Sir Martin Marall, Dryden's second pure comedy. But 
it is in no sense an original play, and Dryden was not even 
the original adapter. The Duke of Newcastle, famous 
equally for his own gallantry in the civil war, and for the 
oddities of his second duchess, Margaret Lucas, translated 
VEtourdi, and gave it to Dryden, who perhaps combined 
with it some things taken from other French plays, added 
not a little of his own, and had it acted. It was for 
those days exceedingly successful, running more than thirty 
nights at its first appearance. It is very coarse in parts, 
but amusing enough. The English blunderer is a much 
more contemptible person than his French original. He 
is punished instead of being rewarded, and there is a great 
dd'al of broad farce brought in. Dryden was about this 
time frequently engaged in this doubtful sort of collabo- 
ration, and the very next play which he produced, also a 
result of it, has done his reputation more harm than any 
other. 'This was the disgusting burlesque of the Tempest, 
which, happily, there is much reason for thinking belongs 



44 DRYDEN. [chap. 

almost wholly to Davenant. Besides degrading in every 
way the poetical merit of the poem, Sir William, from 
whom better things might have been expected, got into 
his head what Dryden amiably calls the " excellent con- 
trivance " of giving Miranda a sister, and inventing a boy 
(Hippolito) who has never seen a woman. The excellent 
contrivance gives rise to a good deal of extremely charac- 
teristic wit. But here, too, there is little reason for giving 
Dryden credit or discredit for anything more than a cer- 
tain amount of arrangement and revision. His next ap- 
pearance, in 1668, with the Mock Astrologer was a more 
independent one. He was, indeed, as wa^ very usual with 
him, indebted to others for the main points of his play, 
which comes partly from Thomas Corneille's Feint Astro- 
logue, partly from the Depit Amoureux. But the play, 
with the usual reservations, may be better spoken of than 
any of Dryden's comedies, except Marriage a la Mode and 
Amphitryon. Wildblood and Jacintha, who play the parts 
of Celadon and Florimel in the Maiden Queen, are a very 
lively pair. Much of the dialogue is smart, and the inci- 
dents are stirring, while the play contains no less than four 
of the admirable sonofs which Dryden now be&'an to lavish 
on his audiences. In the same year, or perhaps in 1669, 
appeared the play of Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr, 
a compound of exquisite beauties and absurdities of the 
most frantic description. The part of St. Catherine {vevj 
inappropriately allotted to Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn) is beauti- 
ful throughout, and that of Maximin is quite captivating 
in its outrageousness. The Astral spirits who appear gave 
occasion for some terrible parody in the Rehearsal, but 
their verses are in themselves rather attractive. An ac- 
count of the final scene of the play will perhaps show bet- 
ter than anything else the rant and folly in which authors 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 45 

indulged, and which audiences applaudec: in these plays. 
The Emperor Maximin is dissatisfied with the conduct of 
the upper powers in reference to his domestic peace. He 
tlius expresses his dissatisfaction : 

" What liad the gods to do with me or mine ? 
Did I molest your heaven ? 
Why should you then make Maximin your foe, 
Who paid you tribute, which he need not do ? 
Your altars I with smoke of rams did crown, 
For which you leaned your hungry nostrils down, 
* All daily gaping for my incense there, 

More than your sun could draw you in a year. 
And you for this these plagues have on me sent. 
But, by the gods (by Maximin, I meant). 
Henceforth I and my world 
Hostility with you and yours declare. 
Look to' it, gods ! for you the aggressors are. 
Keep you your rain and sunshine in your skies, 
And I'll keep back my flame and sacrifice. 
Your trade of heaven shall soon be at a stand, 
And all your goods lie dead upon your hand." 

Thereupon an aggrieved and possibly shocked follower, 
of the name of Placidius, stabs him, but the Emperor wrests 
the dagger from him and returns the blow. Then follows 
this stage direction : " Placidius falls, and the Emperor 
staggers after him and sits down upon him." From this 
singular throne his guards offer to assist him. But he de- 
clines help, and, having risen once, sits down again upon 
Placidius, who, despite the stab and the weight of the 
Emperor, is able to address an irreproachable decasyllabic 
couplet to the audience. Thereupon Maximin again stabs 
the person upon whom he is sitting, and they both expire 
as follows : 



46 DRYDEN. [chap. 

" Plac. Oh! ..am gone. Max. And after thee I go, 
Revenging still and following ev'n to the other world my blow, 
And shoving back this earth on which I sit, 
I'll mount and sciitter all the gods I hit." 

\_Stabs him again.'\ 

Tyrannic Love was followed by the two parts of Al- 
manzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada, the 
triumph and kt th6 same time the reductio ad ahsurdum 
of the style. I cannot do better than give a full argument 
of this famous production, which nobody now reads, and 
which is full of lines that everybody habitually quotes. 

The kingdom of Granada under its last monarch, Boab- 
delin, is divided by the quarrels of factions, or rather fam- 
ilies — the Abencerrages and the Zegrys. At a festival 
held in the capital this dissension breaks out. A stranger 
interferes on v;hat appears to be the weaker side, and kills 
a prominent leader of the opposite party, altogether dis- 
regarding the king's injunctions to desist. He is seized 
by the guards and ordered for execution, but is then dis- 
covered to be Almanzor, a valiant person lately arrived 
from Africa, who has rendered valuable assistance to the 
Moors in their combat with the Spaniards. The king 
thereupon apologizes, and Almanzor addresses much out- 
rageous language to the factions. This is successful, and 
harmony is apparently restored. Then there enters the 
Duke of Arcos, a Spanish envoy, who propounds hard con- 
ditions; but Almanzor remarks that " the Moors have 
Heaven and me," and the duke retires. Almahide, the 
king's betrothed, sends a messenger to invite him to a 
dance; but Almanzor insists upon a sally Hfirst, and the 
first act endg with the acceptance of this order of amuse- 
ment. The second opens with the triumphant return of 
the Moors, the ever-victorious Almanzor having captured 



m.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 47 

the Dnke of Arcos. Then is introduced the first female 
character of importance, Lyndaraxa, sister of Zulema, the 
Zegry chief, and representative throughout the drama of 
the less amiable qualities of womankind. Abdalla, the 
king's brother, makes love to her, and she very plainly 
tells him that if he were king she might have something 
to say to him. Zulema's factiousness strongly seconds 
his sister's ambition and her jealousy of Almahide, and 
the act ends by the formation of a conspiracy against 
Boabdelin, the conspirators resolving to attach the invin- 
cibla.Almanzor to their side. The third act borrows its 
opening from the incident of Hotspur's wrath, Almanzor 
being provoked with Boabdelin for the same cause as 
Harry Percy with Henry IV. Thus he is disposed to join 
Abdalla, while Abdelmelech, the chief of the Abencerrages, 
is introduced in a scene full of " sighs and flames," as the 
prince's rival for the hand of Lyndaraxa. The promised 
dance takes place with one of Dryden's delightful, and, 
alas ! scarcely ever wholly quotable lyrics. The first two 
stanzas may however be given : 

" Beneath a myrtle's shade, 
Which love for none but happy lovers made, 
I slept, and straight my love before me brought 
Phyllis, the object of my waking thought. 
Undressed she came my flame to meet, 
While love strewed flowers beneath her feet, 
Flowers which, so pressed by her, became more sweet, 

"From the bright vision's head 
A careless veil of lawn was loosely shed, 
From her white temples fell her shaded hair. 
Like cloudy sunshine, not too brown nor fair. 
Her hands, her lips, did love inspire. 
Her every grace my heart did fire, 
But most her eyes, which languished with desire." 



48 DRYDEN. [chap. 

It is a thousand pities that the quotation cannot be con- 
tinued ; but it cannot, though the verse is more artfully 
beautiful even than here. 

While, however, the king and his court are listening 
and looking, mischief is brewing. Alm^nzor, Abdalla, and 
the Zegrys are in arms. The king is diiven in ; Almahide 
is captured. Then a scene takes place between Almanzor 
and Almahide in the full spirit of the style. Almanzor 
sues for Almahide as a prisoner that he may set her at 
liberty ; but a rival appears in the powerful Zulema. Al- 
manzor is disobliged by Abdalla, and at once makes his 
way to the citadel, Avhither Boabdelin has fled, and offers 
him his services. At the beginning of the fourth act they 
are of course accepted with joy, and equally of course ef- 
fectual. Almanzor renews his suit, but Almahide refers 
him to her father. The fifth act is still fuller of extrava- 
gances. Lyndaraxa holds a fort which has been commit- 
ted to her against both parties, and they discourse with 
her from without the walls. The unlucky Almanzor pre- 
fers his suit to the king and to Almahide's father; has 
recourse to violence on being refused, and is overpowered 
— for a wonder — and bound. His life is, however, spared, 
and after a parting scene with Almahide he withdraws 
from the city. 

The second part opens in the Spanish camp, but soon 
shifts to Granada, where the unhappy Boabdelin has to 
face the mutinies provoked by the expulsion of Almanzor. 
The king has to stoop to entreat Almahide, now his 
queen, to use her influence with her lover to come back. 
An act of fine confused fighting follows, in which Lynda- 
raxa's castle is stormed, the stormers in their turn driven 
out by the Duke of Arcos and Abdalla, who has joined the 
Spaniards, and a general imbroglio created. But Almanzor 



ni.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 49 

obeys Almahide's summons, with the result of more sighs 
and flames. The conduct of Almahide is unexceptiona- 
ble ; but Boabdelin's jealousy is inevitably aroused, and 
this in its turn mortally offends the queen, which again 
offends Ahnanzor. More inexplicable embroilment follows, 
and Lyndaraxa tries her charms vainly on the champion. 
The war once more centres round the Albayzin, Lynda- 
raxa's sometime fortress, and it is not flippant to say that 
every one fights with every one else ; after which the hero 
sees the ghost of his mother, and addresses it more suo. 
Yet-another love-scene follows, and then Zulema, who has 
not forgotten his passion for Almahide, brings a false ac- 
cusation against her, the assumed partner of her guilt be- 
ing, however, not Alraanzor, but Abdelmelech. This leaves 
the hero free to undertake the wager of battle for his mis- 
tress, though he is distracted with jealous fear that Zule- 
ma's tale is true. The result of the ordeal is a foregone 
conclusion ; but Almahide, though her innocence is proved, 
is too angry with her husband for doubting her to forgive 
him, and solemnly forswears his society. She and Alman- 
zor meet once more, and by this time even the convention- 
alities of the heroic play allow him to kiss her hand. The 
king is on the watch, and breaks in with fresh accusations; 
but the Spaniards at the gates cut short the discussion, and 
(at last) the embroilment and suffering of true love. The 
catastrophe is arrived at in the most approved manner. 
Boabdelin dies fighting ; Lyndaraxa, who has given trai- 
torous help with her Zegrys, is proclaimed queen by Fer- 
dinand, but almost immediately stabbed by Abdelmelech. 
Almanzor turns out to be the long-lost son of the Duke 
of Arcos ; and Almahide, encouraged by Queen Isabella, 
owns that when her year of widowhood is up she may 
possibly be induced to crown his flames. 
3* 



50 DRYDEN. [chap. 

Such is the barest outline of this famous play, and I fear 
that as it is it is too long, though much has been omit- 
ted, including the whole of a pleasing underplot of love 
between two very creditable lovers, Osmyn and Benzayda. 
Its preposterous " revolutions and discoveries," the wild 
bombast of Almanzor and others, the apparently purpose- 
less embroilment of the action in ever- new turns and 
twists are absurd enough ; but there is a kind of generous 
and noble spirit animating it which could not fail to catch 
an audience blinded by fashion to its absurdities. There 
is a skilful sequence even in the most preposterous events, 
which must have kept up the interest unfalteringly ; and 
all over the dialogue are squandered and lavished flowers 
of splendid verse. Many of its separate lines are, as has 
been said, constantly quoted without the least idea on the 
quoter's part of their origin, and many more are quotable. 
Everybod}^ for instance, knows the vigorous couplet : 

"Forgiveness to the injured does belong, 
But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong ;" 

but everybody does not know the preceding couplet, which 
is, perhaps, better still : 

" A blush remains in a forgiven face ; 
It wears the silent tokens of disgrace." 

Almanzor's tribute to Lyndaraxa's beauty, at the same 
time that he rejects her advances, is in little, perhaps, as 
good an instance as could be given of the merits of the 
poetry and of the stamp of its spirit, and with this I must 
be content : 

" Fair though you are 
As summer mornings, and your eyes more bright 
' Than stars that twinkle on a winter's night ; 



111.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 51 

Though you have eloquence to warm and move 
Cold age and fasting hermits into love ; 
Though Almahide with scorn rewards my care, 
Yet than to change 'tis nobler to despair. 
My love's my soul, and that from fate is free — 
'Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me." 

The audience that cheered this was not wholly vile. 

The Conquest of Granada appeared in 1670, and in 
the following year the famous Rehearsal was brought out 
at the King's Theatre. The importance of this event in 
Dr^en's life is considerable, but it has been somewhat 
exaggerated. In the first place, the satire, keen as much 
of it is, is only lialf directed against himself. The origi- 
nal Bayes was beyond all doubt Davenant, to whom some 
of the jokes directly apply, while they have no reference 
to Dryden. In the second place, the examples of heroic 
plays selected for parody and ridicule are by no means ex- 
clusively drawn from Dryden's theatre. His brothers-in- 
law, Edward and Robert Howard, and others, figure be- 
side him, and the central character is, on the whole, as 
composite as might be expected from the number of au- 
thors whose plays are satirized. Although fathered by 
Buckingham, it seems likely that not much of the play is 
actually his. His coadjutors are said to have been Butler, 
Sprat, and Martin Clifford, Master of the Charterhouse, au- 
thor of some singularly ill-tempered if not very pointed 
remarks on Dryden's plays, which were not published till 
long afterwards. Butler's hand is, indeed, traceable in 
many of the parodies of heroic diction, none of which are 
so good as his acknowledged " Dialogue of Cat and Puss." 
The wit and, for the most part, the justice of the satire are 
indisputable ; and if it be true, as I am told, that the Re- 
hearsal does not now make a good acting play, the fact 



52 DRYDEN. [chap. 

does not bear favourable testimony to tbe culture and re- 
ceptive powers of modern audiences. But there were many 
reasons why Dryden should take the satire very coolly, as 
in fact he did. As he says, with his customary proud hu- 
mility, " his betters were much more concerned than him- 
self ;" and it seems highly probable that Buckingham's co- 
adjutors, confiding in his good nature or his inability to 
detect the liberty, had actually introduced not a few traits 
of his own into this singularly composite portrait. In the 
second place, the farce was what would be now called an 
advertisement, and a very good one. Nothing can be a 
greater mistake than to say or to think that the Rehearsal 
killed heroic plays. It did nothing of the kind, Dryden 
himself going on writing them for some years until his 
own fancy made him cease, and others continuing still 
longer. There is a play of Crowne's, Caligula, in which 
many of the scenes are rhymed, dating as late as 1698, 
and the general character of the heroic play, if not the 
rhymed form, continued almost unaltered. Certainly Dry- 
den's equanimity was very little disturbed. Buckingham 
he paid off in kind long afterwards, and his Grace im- 
mediately proceeded, by his answer, to show how little he 
can have had to do with the Rehearsal. To Sprat and 
Clifford no allusions that I know of are to be found in 
his writings. As for Butler, an honourable mention in a 
letter to Lawrence Hyde shows how little acrimony he felt 
towards him. Indeed, it may be said of Dryden that he 
was at no time touchy about personal attacks. It was 
only when, as Shadwell subsequently did, the assailants be- 
came outrageous in their abuse, and outstepped the bounds 
of fair literary warfare, or when, as in Blackmore's case 
there was some singular ineptitude in the fashion of the 
attack, that he condescended to reply. t^.^jh \'rc'\mi 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 53 

It is all tlie more surprising that he should, at no great 
distance of time, have engaged gratuitously in a contest 
which brought him no honour, and in which his allies 
were quite unworthy of him. Elkanah Settle w^as one of 
Rochester's innumerable led-poets, and was too utterly be- 
neath contempt to deserve even Rochester's spite. The 
character of Doeg, ten years later, did Settle complete 
justice. He had a " blundering kind of melody " about 
him, but absolutely nothing else. However, a heroic play 
of his, the Em'press of Morocco^ had considerable vogue for 
soMe incomprehensible reason. Dryden allowed himself 
to be drawn by Crowne and Shadwell into writing with 
them a pamphlet of criticisms on the piece. Settle re- 
plied by a study, as we should say nowadays, of the very 
vulnerable Conquest of Granada. This is the only in- 
stance in which Dryden went out of his way to attack any 
one; and even in this instance Settle had given sonie 
cause by an allusion of a contemptuous kind in his preface. 
But as a rule the laureate showed himself proof against 
much more venomous criticisms than any that Elkanah was 
capable of. It is perhaps not uncharitable to suspect that 
the preface of the Empress of Morocco bore to some ex- 
tent the blame of the Rehearsal^ which it must be remem- 
bered was for years amplified and re-edited with parodies 
of fresh plays of Dryden's as they appeared. If this were 
the case it would not be the only instance of such a trans- 
ference of irritation, and it would explain Dryden's other- 
wise inexplicable conduct. His attack on Settle is, from 
a strictly literary point of view, one of his most unjustifia- 
ble acts. The pamphlet, it is true, is said to have been 
mainly "Starch Johnny" Crowne's, and the character of 
its strictures is quite different from Dryden's broad and 
catholic manner of censuring. But -the adage, " tell me 



54 DRYDEN. [cHip. 

with whom you live," is peculiarly applicable in siich a 
case, and Dryden must be held responsible for the assault, 
whether its venom be really due to himself, to Crowne, or 
to the fonl-mouthed libeller of whose virulence the laure- 
ate himself was in years to come to have but too familiar 
experience. 

A very different play in 1672 gave Dryden almost as 
much credit in comedy as the Conquest of Granada in 
tragedy. There is, indeed, a tragic or serious underplot 
(and a very ridiculous one, too) in Marriage a la Mode. 
But its main interest, and certainly its main value, is comic. 
It is Dryden's only original excursion into the realms of 
the higher comedy. For his favourite pair of lovers he 
here substitutes a quartette. Rhodophil and Doralice are 
a fashionable married pair, who, without having actually 
exhausted their mutual affection, are of opinion that their 
character is quite gone if they continue faithful to each 
other any longer. Rhodophil accordingly lays siege to 
Melantha, a young lady who is intended, though he does 
not know^ this, to marry his friend Palamede, while Pala- 
mede, deeply distressed at the idea of matrimony, devotes 
himself to Doralice. The cross purposes of this quartette 
are admirably related, and we are given to understand that 
no harm comes of it all. But in Doralice and Melantha 
Dryden has given studies of womankind quite out of Mb 
usual line. Melantha is, of course, far below Millamant, 
but it is not certain that that delightful creation of Con- 
greve's genius does not owe something to her. Doralice, 
on the other hand, has ideas as to the philosophy of flirta- 
tion which do her no little credit. It is a thousand pities 
that the play is written in the language of the time, which 
makes it impossible to revive and difficult to read without 
disgust. 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY". 55 

Nothing of this kind can or need be said about the 
play which followed, the Assignation. It is vulgar, coarse, 
and dull; it was damned, and deserved it; while its suc- 
cessor, Amboyna, is also deserving of the same epithets, 
though being a mere play of ephemeral interest, and serv- 
ing its turn, it was not damned. The old story of the 
Amboyna massacre — a bad enough story, certainly — was 
simply revived in order to excite the popular wrath against 
the Dutch. 

The dramatic production which immediately succeeded 
these is one of the most curious of Dryden's perform- 
ances. A disinclination to put himself to the trouble of 
designing a wholly original composition is among the most 
noteworthy of his literary characteristics. No man fol- 
lowed or copied in a more original manner, but it alw^ays 
seems to have been a relief to him to have something to 
follow or to copy. Two at least of his very best produc- 1 
tions — All for Love and Palamon and Arcite — are spe-j 
cially remarkable in this respect. We can hardly say that 
the State of Innocence ranks with either of these ; yet it 
has considerable merits — merits of which very few of 
those/who repeat the story about " tagging Milton's verses " 
are uware. As for that story itself, it is not particularly 
CTivJitable to the good manners of the elder poet. "Ay, 
ybung man, you may tag my verses if you will," is the 
-^/^'pditional reply which Milton is said to have made to 

yden's request for permission to write the opera. The 
i^y^estion of Dryden's relationship to Milton and his early 
opinion of Paradise Lost is rather a question for a Life of 
MiltoF. than for the present pages : it is sufficient to say 
that, with his unfailing recognition of good work, Dryden 
undoubtedly appreciated Milton to the full long before 
A idison, as it is vulgarly held, taught the British public 



56 DRYDEN. ^chap. 

to admire him. As for tlie State of Innocence itself, the 
conception of such an opera has sometimes been derided 
as preposterous — a derision which seems to overlook the 
fact that Milton was himself, in some degree, indebted to 
an Italian dramatic original. The piece is not wholly in 
rhyme, but contains some very fine passages. 

The time was approaching, however, v> hen Dryden was 
to quit his " long-loved mistress Rhyme," as far as dra- 
matic writing was concerned. These words occur in the 
prologue to Aurengzehe, which appeared in 1675. It would 
appear, indeed, that at this time Dryden was thinking of 
deserting not merely rhymed plays, but play-writing alto- 
gether. The dedication to Mulgrave contains one of sev- 
eral allusions to his well-known plan of writing a great 
heroic poem. Sir George Mackenzie had recently put 
him upon the plan of reading through most of the earlier 
English poets, and he had done so attentively, with the 
result of aspiring to the epic itself. But he still continued 
to write dramas, though Aurengzebe was his last in rhyme, 
at least wholly in rhyme. It is in some respects a very 
noble play, free from the rants, the preposterous bustle, 
and the still more preposterous length of the Conq\ "M of 
Granada, while possessing most of the merits of tha' sin- 
gular work in an eminent degree. Even Dryden ha^^ly 
ever went farther in cunning of verse than in some of t!i ? 
passages of Aurengzebe, such as that well-known one whi]>' 
seems to take up an echo of Macbeth : c 

" When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat. 
Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit, 
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay. 
To-morrow's falser than the former day. 
Lies worse, and while it says, we shall be blest 
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. 



III.] PERIO::> OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 51 

Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again, 
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain, 
' And from the dregs of life think to receive 
What the first sprightly running could not give. 
I'm tired with waiting for this chemic gold 
Which fools us young and beggars us when old." 

There is a good deal of moralizing of this melancholy 
kind in the play, the characters of which are drawn with 
a serious completeness not previously attempted by the 
author. It is perhaps the only one of Dryden's which, 
witlj, very little alteration, might be acted, at least as a 
curiosity, at the present day. It is remarkable that the 
structure of the verse in the play itself would have led to 
the conclusion that Dryden was about to abandon rhyme. 
There is in Aurengzehe a great tendency towards enjamhe- 
ment ; and as soon as this tendency gets the upper hand, 
a recurrence to blank verse is, in English dramatic writing, 
tolerably certain. For the intonation of English is not, 
like the intonatioji of French, such that rhyme is an abso- 
lute necessity to distinguish verse from prose ; and where 
this necessity does not exist, rhyme must always appear 
to an intelligent critic a more or less impertinent intrusion 
in dramatic poetry. Indeed, the main thing which had 
for a time converted Dryden and others to the use of the 
couplet in drama was a curious notion that blank verse 
was too easy for long and dignified compositions. It was 
thought by others that the secret of it had been lost, and 
that the choice was practicall}^ between bad blank verse 
and good rhyme. In All for Love Dryden very shortly 
showed, amhulando, that this notion was wholly ground- 
less. From this time forward he was faithful to the model 
he had now adopted, and — which was of the greatest im- 
portance — he induced others to be faithful too. Had it 
E 



58 . DRYDEN. J [chap. 

not been for this, it is almost certain that Venice Preserved 
would have been in rhyme ; that is to say, that it would 
have been spoilt. In this same year, 1675, a publisher, 
Bentley (of whom Dryden afterwards spoke with consid- 
erable bitterness), brought out a play called The Mistaken 
Husband, which is stated to have been revised, and to have 
had a scene added to it by Dryden. Dryden, however, 
definitely disowned it, and I cannot think that it is in any 
part his ; though it is fair to say that some good judges, 
notably Mr. Swinburne, think differently.^ Nearly three 
years passed without anything of Dryden's appearing, and 
at last, at the end of 1677, or the beginning of 1678, ap- 
peared a play as much better than Aurengzehe as Aureng- 
zebe was better than its forerunners. This was All for 
Love, his first drama, in blank verse, and his " only play 
written for himself." More will be said later on the cu- 
rious fancy which made him tread in the very steps of 
Shakspeare. It is sufficient to say now that the attempt, 
apparently foredoomed to hopeless failure, is, on the con- 
trary, a great success. Antony and Cleopatra and All for 

^ The list of Dryden's spurious or doubtful works is not large or 
important. But a note of Pepys, mentioning a play of Dryden en- 
titled Ladies a la Mode, which was acted and damned in 1668, has 
puzzled the commentators. There is no trace of this Ladies a, la 
Mode. But Mr. E. W. Gosse has in his collection a play entitled TJie 
Mall, or The Modish Lovers, which he thinks may possibly be the very 
" mean thing " of Pepys' scornful mention. The difference of title 
is not fatal, for Samuel was not over-accurate in such matters. The 
play is anonymous, but the preface is signed J. D. The date is 1 674, 
and the printing is execrable, and evidently not revised by the author, 
"whoever he was. Notwithstanding this, the prologue, the epilogue, 
and a song contain some vigorous verse and phrase sometimes not a 
little suggestive of Dryden. In the entire absence of external evi- 
dence connecting him with it, the question, though one of much in- 
terest, is perhaps not one to be dealt with at any length here, 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 59 

Love, when they are contrasted, only show by the contrast 
the difference of kind, not the difference of degree, be- 
tween their writers. The heroic conception has here, in 
all probability, as favourable exposition given to it as it is 
capable of, and it must be admitted that it makes a not un- 
favourable show even without the "dull sweets of rhyme" 
to drug the audience into good humour with it. The fa- 
mous scene between Antony and Ventidius divides with 
the equally famous scene in Don Sebastian between Sebas- 
tian and Dorax the palm among Dryden's dramatic efforts. 
Bu* as a whole the play is, I think, superior to Don Sebas- 
tian. The blank verse, too, is particularly interesting, be- 
cause it was almost its author's first attempt at that crux; 
and because, for at least thirty years, hardly any tolerable 
blank verse — omitting of course Hilton's — had been writ- 
ten by any one. The model is excellent, and it speaks 
Dryden's uneri'ing literary sense, that, fresh as he was from 
the study of Paradise Lost, and great as was his admira- 
tion for its author, he does not for a moment attempt to 
confuse the epic and the tragic modes of the style. All 
for Love was, and deserved to be, successful. The play, 
which followed it, Limberham, was, and deserved to be, 
damned. It must be one of the most astonishing things 
to any one who has not fully grasped the weakness as well 
as the strength of Dryden's character, that the noble mat- 
ter and manner of Aurengzebe and All for Love should 
have been followed by this filthy stuff. As a play, it is by 
no means Diy den's worst piece of work; but, in all other 
respects, the less said about it the better. During the time 
of its production the author collaborated with Lee in writ- 
ing the tragedy of (Edipus, in which both the friends are 
to be seen almost at their best. On Dryden's part, the 
lyric ipcantation scenes are perhaps most noticeable, an4 



60 DRYDEN. [chap. 

Lee mingles throughout his usual bombast with his usual 
splendid poetry. If any one thinks this expression hy- 
perbolical, I shall only ask him to read (Edipus, instead 
of taking the traditional witticisms about Lee for gospel. 
There is of course plenty of — 

" Let gods meet gods and jostle in the dark," 

and the other fantastic follies, into which " metaphysical" 
poetry and "heroic" plays had seduced men of talent, 
and sometimes of genius ; but these can be excused when 
they lead to such a passage as that where (Edipus cries — • 

" Thou coward ! yet 
Art Hving ? canst not, wilt not find the road 
To the great palace of magnificent death, 
Though thousand ways lead to his thousand doors 
Which day and night are still unbarred for all." 

(Edipus led to a quarrel with the players of the King's 
Theatre, of the merits of which, as we only have a one- 
sided statement, it is not easy to judge. But Dryden 
seems to have formed a connexion about this time with 
the other or Duke's company, and by them (April, 1679) 
a "potboiling" adaptation of Troilus and Cressida was 
brought out, which might much better have been left un- 
attempted. Two years afterwards appeared the last play 
(leaving operas and the scenes contributed to the Duke of 
Guise out of the question) that Dryden was to write for 
many years. This was The Spanish Friar, a popular piece, 
possessed of a good deal of merit, from the technical point 
of view of the play-wright, but which I think has been 
somewhat over-rated, as far as literary excellence is con- 
cerned. The principal character is no doubt amusing, but 
he is heavilv indebted to Falstaff on the one hand, and to 
Fletcher's Lopez on the other ; and he reminds the reader 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 61 

of both his ancestors in a way which cannot but be un- 
favourable to himself. The play is to me most interesting 
because of the light it throws on Dryden's grand charac- 
teristic, the consummate craftsmanship with which he could 
throw himself into the popular feeling of the hour. This 
" Protestant play " is perhaps his most notable achieve- 
ment of the kind in drama, and it may be admitted that 
some other achievements of the same kind are less cred- 
itable. 

Allusion has more than once been made to the very high 
qtrality, from the literary point of view, of the songs which 
appear in nearly all the plays of this long list. They con- 
stitute Dryden's chief title to a high rank as a composer 
of strictly lyrical poetry ; and there are indeed few things 
which better illustrate the range of his genius than these 
exquisite snatches. At first sight, it would not seem by 
any means likely that a poet whose greatesttriumphs were 
won in the fields of satire and of argumentative verse 
should succeed in such things. Ordinary lyric, especially 
of the graver and more elaborate kind, might not surprise 
us from such a man. But the song-gift is something dis- 
tinct from the faculty of ordinary lyrical composition ; and 
there is certainly nothing which necessarily infers it in the 
pointed declamation and close-ranked argument with which 
the name of Dryden is oftenest associated. But the later 
seventeenth century had a singular gift for such perform- 
ance — a kind of swan-song, it might be thought, before 
the death-like slumber which, with few and brief intervals, 
was to rest upon the English lyric for a hundred years. 
Dorset, Rochester, even Mulgrave, wrote singularly fasci- 
nating songs, as smooth and easy as Moore's, and with far 
less of the commonplace and vulgar about them. Aphra 
Behn was an admirable, and Tom Durfey a far from des- 



62 DRYDEN. [chap. 

picable, songster. Even among the common run of play- 
wrights, who have left no lyrical and not much literary 
reputation, scraps and snatches which have the true song 
stamp are not unfrequently to be found. But Dryden 
excelled them all in the variety of his cadences and the 
ring of his lines. I^owhere do we feel more keenly the 
misfortune of his licence of language, which prevents too 
many of these charming songs from being now quoted or 
sung. Their abundance may b^ illustrated by the fact 
that a single play, The Mock Astrologer, contains no less 
than four songs of the very first lyrical merit. "You 
charmed me not with that fair face," is an instance of the 
well-known common measure which is so specially Eng- 
lish, and which is poetry or doggrel according to its ca- 
dence. "After the pangs of a desperate lover" is one 
of the rare examples of a real dactylic metre in English, 
were the dactyls are not, as usual, equally to be scanned 
as anapaests. " Calm was the even, and clear was the sky," 
is a perfect instance of what may be called archness in 
song; and "Celimena of my heart," though not much 
can be said for the matter of it, is at least as much a met- 
rical triumph as any of the others. Nor are the other 
plays less rich in similar work. The song beginning 
" Farewell, ungrateful traitor," gives a perfect example of 
a metre which has been used more than once in our own 
days with great success; and "Long between Love and 
Fear Phyllis tormented," which occurs in The Assignation, 
gives yet another example of the singular fertility with 
which Dryden devised and managed measures suitable for 
song. His lyrical faculty impelled him also — especially 
in his early plays — to luxuriate in incantation scenes, lyr- 
ical dialogues, and so forth. These have been ridiculed, 
not altogether unjustly, in The Rehearsal ; but the incan- 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 63 

tation scene in (Edipus is very far above the average of 
such things ; and of not a few passages in King Arthur 
at least as much may be said. 

Dryden's energy was so entirely occupied with play- 
writing during this period that he had hardly, it would 
appear, time or desire to undertake any other work. To- 
wards the middle of it, however, when he had, by poems 
and plays, already established himself as the greatest liv- 
ing poet — Milton being out of the question — he began to 
be asked for prologues and epilogues by other poets, or 
by the ^actors on the occasion of the revival of old plays. 
These prologues and epilogues have often been comment- 
ed upon as one of the most curious literary phenomena of 
the time. The custom is still, on special occasions, spar- 
ingly kept up on the stage ; but the prologue, and still 
more the epilogue, to the Westminster play are the chief 
living representatives of it. It was usual to comment in 
these pieces on circumstances of the day, political and oth- 
er. It was also usual to make personal appeals to the au- 
dience for favour and support very much in the manner 
of the old Trouveres when they commended their wares. 
But more than all, and worst of all, it was usual to indulge 
in the extremest licence both of language and meaning. 
The famous epilogue — one of Dryden's own — to Tyran- 
nic Love, in which Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn, being left for dead 
on the stage, in the character of St. Catherine, and being 
about to be carried out by the scene-shifters, exclaims — 

" Hold ! are you mad ? you damned confounded dog, 
I am to rise and speak the epilogue," 

is only a very mild sample of these licences, upon which 
Macaulay has commented with a severity which is for 
once absolutely justifiable. There was, however, no poet 



64 DRYDEN. [chap. 

who had the knack of telling allusion to passing events 
as Dryden had, and he was early engaged as a prologue 
writer. The first composition that we have of this kind 
written for a play not his own is the prologue to Alhuma- 
zar, a curious piece, believed, but not known, to have been 
written by a certain Tomkis in James the First's reign, 
and ranking among the many which have been attributed 
with more or less (generally less) show of reason to Shak- 
speare. Dry den's knowledge of the early English drama 
was not exhaustive, and he here makes a charge of plagi- 
arism against Ben Jonson, for which there is in all proba- 
bility not the least ground. The piece contains, however, 
as do most of these vigorous, though unequal composi- 
tions, many fine lines. The next production of the kind 
not intended for a play of his own is the prologue to the 
first performance of the king's servants, after they had 
been burnt out of their theatre, and this is followed by 
many others. In 1673 a prologue to the University of 
Oxford, spoken when the Silent Woman was acted, is the 
first of many of the same kind. It has been mentioned 
that Dryden speaks slightingly of these University prol- 
ogues, but they are among his best pieces of the class, and 
are for the most part entirely free from the ribaldry with 
which he was but too often wont to alloy them. In these 
years pieces intended to accompany Carlell's Arviragus 
and Philicia, Etherege's Man of Mode, Charles Davenant's 
Circe, Lee's Mithridates, Shad well's True Widoiu, Lee's 
Caesar Borgia, Tate's Loyal General, and not a few others 
occur. A specimen of the style in which Dryden excelled 
so remarkably, and which is in itself so utterly dead, may 
fairly be given here, and nothing can be better for the 
purpose than the most famous prologue to the University 
of Oxford. This is the prologue in which the poet at 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 65 

once displays his exquisite capacity for flattery, his com- 
mand over versification, and his singular antipathy to his 
own Alma Mater ; an antipathy which, it may be pointed 
out, is confirmed by the fact of his seeking his master's 
degree rather at Lambeth than at Cambridge. Whether 
any solution to the enigma can be found in Dennis's re- 
mark that the " younger fry " at Cambridge preferred Set- 
tle to their own champion, it would be vain to attempt to 
determine. The following piece, however, may be taken 
as a fair specimen of the more decent prologue of the 
lat^r seventeenth century : 

" Though actors cannot much of learning boast, 
Of all who want it, we admire it most : 
We love the praises of a learned pit, 
As we remotely are allied to wit. 
We speak our poet's wit, and trade in ore, 
Like those who touch upon t>ie golden shore ; 
Betwixt our judges can distinction make, 
Discern how much, and why, our poems take ; 
Mark if the fools, or men of sense, rejoice ; / 

Whether the applause be only sound or voice. 
When our fop gallants, or our city folly, 
Clap over-loud, it makes us melancholy : 
We doubt that scene which does their wonder raise, 
And, for their ignorance, contemn their praise. 
Judge, then, if we who act, and they who write. 
Should not be proud of giving you delight. 
London likes grossly ; but this nicer pit 
Examines, fathoms all the depths of wit ; . 
The ready finger lays on every blot ; 
Knows what should justly please, and what should not. 
Nature herself lies open to your view, 
You judge, by her, what draught of her is true. 
Where outlines false, and colours seem too faint. 
Where bunglers daub, and where true poets paint. 
4 



66 DRYDEN. [csap. 

But by the sacred genius of this place, 

By every Muse, by each domestic grace, 

Be kind to wit, which but endeavours well, 

And, where you judge, presumes not to exceL 

Our poets hither for adoption come, 

As nations sued to be made free of Rome ; 

Not in the sufEragating tribes to stand, 

But in your utmost, last, provincial band. 

If his ambition may those hopes pursue, 

Who with religion loves your arts and you, 

Oxford to him a dearer name shall be. 

Than his own mother-university. 

Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage ; 

He chooses Athens in his riper age." 

During this busy period, Dryden's domestic life had 
been comparatively uneventful. His eldest son had been 
born either in 1665 or in 1666, it seems not clear which. 
His second son, John, was born a year or two later ; and 
the third, Erasmus Henry, in May, 1669. These three 
sons were all the children Lady Elizabeth brought him. 
The two eldest went, like their father, to Westminster, 
and had their schoolboy troubles there, as letters of Dryden 
still extant show. During the whole period, except in his 
brief visits to friends and patrons in the country, he was 
established in the house in Gerrard Street, which is identi- 
fied with his name.^ While the children were young, his 
means must have been sufficient, and, for those days, con- 

' A bouse in Fetter Lane, now divided into two, bears a plate stating 
that Dryden lived there. The plate, as I was informed by the pres- 
ent occupiers, replaces a stone slab or inscription which was destroy- 
ed in some alterations not very many years ago. I know of no ref- 
erence to this house in any book, nor does Mr. J. C. Collins, who 
called my attention to it. If Dryden ever lived here, it must have 
been between his residence with Herringman and his marriage. 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 6^ 

siderable. With his patrimony included, Malone has cal- 
culated that for great part of the time his income must 
have been fully 700Z. a year, equal in purchasing power 
to 2000^. a year in Malone's time, and probably to nearer 
3000Z. now. In June, 1668, the degree of Master of Arts, 
to which, for some reason or other, Dryden had never pro- 
ceeded at Cambridge, was, at the recommendation of the 
king, conferred upon him by the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury. Two years later, in the summer of 1670, he was 
made poet laureate and historiographer royal, ^ Davenant, 
the 4ast holder of the laureateship, had died two years 
previously, and Howell, the well-known author of the Epis- 
tolce Ho-Eliance, and the late holder of the historiogra- 
phership, four years before. When the two appointments 
were conferred on Dryden, the salary was fixed in the 
patent at 200^. a year, besides the butt of sack which the 
economical James afterwards cut off, and arrears since 
Davenant's death were to be paid. In the same year, 1670, 
the death of his mother increased his income by the 20Z. 
a year which had been payable to her from the North- 
amptonshire property. From 1667, or thereabouts, Dry- 
den had been in possession of a valuable partnership with 
the players of the king's house, for whom he contracted to 
write three plays a year in consideration of a share and a 
quarter of the profits. Dryden's part of the contract was 
not performed, it seems ; but the actors declare that, at any 
rate for some years, their part was, and that the poet's 
receipts averaged from 300/. to 400Z. a year, besides which 
he had (sometimes, at any rate) the third night, and (we 

^ The patent, given by. Malone, is dated Aug. 18. Mr. W. Noel 
Sainsbury, of the Record Office, has pointed out to me a preliminary 
warrant to " our Attorney or Solicitor Generall" to "prepare a Bill" 
for the purpose dated April 13. 



68 DRYDEN. [t!HAP. 

may suppose always) the bookseller's fee for the copyright 
of the printed play, which together averaged lOOl. a play 
or more. Lastly, at the extreme end of the period most 
probably, but certainly before 1679, the king granted him 
an additional pension of 100/. a year. The importance 
of this pension is more than merely pecuniary, for this is 
the grant, the confirmation of which, after some delay, by 
James, was taken by Macaulay as the wages of apostasy. 

The pecuniary prosperity of this time was accompanied 
by a corresponding abundance of the good things which 
generally go with wealth. Dryden was familiar with most 
of the literary nobles and gentlemen of Charles's court, 
and Dorset, Etherege, Mulgrave, Sedley, and Rochester 
were among his special intimates or patrons, whichever 
word may be preferred. The somewhat questionable boast 
which he made of this familiarity Nemesis was not long 
in punishing, and the instrument which Nemesis chose was 
Rochester himself. It might be said of this famous per- 
son, whom Etherege has hit off so admirably in his 
Dorimant, that he was, except in intellect, the worst of all 
the courtiers of the time, because he was one of the most 
radically un amiable. It was truer of him even than of 
Pope, that he was sure to play some monkey trick or 
other on those who were unfortunate enough to be his in- 
timates. He had relations with most of the literary men 
of his time, but those relations almost always ended badly. 
Sometimes he set them at each other like dogs, or procured 
for one some court favour certain to annoy a rival ; some- 
times he satirized them coarsely in his foul-mouthed 
poems ; sometimes, as we shall see, he forestalled the 
Chevalier de Rohan in his method of repartee. As early 
as 1675 Rochester had disobliged Dryden, though the ex- 
act amount of the injury has certainly been exaggerated 



III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 69 

by Malone, whom most biographers, except Mr. Christie, 
have followed. There is little doubt (though Mr. Christie 
thinks otherwise) that one of the chief functions of the 
poet laureate was to compose masques and such like pieces 
to be acted by the court ; indeed, this appears to have 
been the main regular duty of the oflSce at least in the 
seventeenth century. That Crowne should have been 
charged with the composition of Calisto was, therefore, a 
slight to Dryden. Crowne was not a bad play-wright. 
He might perhaps, by a plagiarism from Lamb's criticism 
on Heywood, be called a kind of prose Dryden, and a 
characteristic saying of Dryden's, which has been handed 
down, seems to show that the latter recognized the fact. 
But the addition to the charge against Rochester that he 
afterwards interfered to prevent an epilogue, which Dryden 
wrote for Crowne's piece, from being recited, rests upon 
absolutely no authority, and it is not even certain that the 
epilogue referred to was actually written by Dryden. 

In the year 1679, however, Dryden had a much more 
serious taste of Rochester's malevolence. He had recently 
become very intimate with Lord Mnlgrave, who had quar- 
relled with Rochester. Personal courage was not Roches- 
ter's forte, and he had shown the white feather when 
challenged by Mulgrave. Shortly afterwards there was 
circulated in manuscript an Essay on Satire, containing 
virulent attacks on the king, on Rochester, and the Duch- 
esses of Cleveland and Portsmouth. How any one could 
ever have suspected that the poem was Dryden's it is dif- 
ficult to understand. To begin with, he never at any time 
in his career lent himself as a hired literary bravo to. any 
private person. In the second place, that he should at- 
tack the king, from whom he derived the greatest part of 
his income, was inconceivable. Thirdly, no literary judge 



10 . . DRYDEN. [cHAP.ra. 

Qould for one moment connect him with the shambling 
doggrel lines which distinguish the Essay on Satire in its 
original form. A very few couplets have some faint ring 
of Dryden's verse, but not more than is perceivable in the 
work of many other poets and poetasters of the time. 
Lastly, Mulgrave, who, with some bad qualities, was truth- 
ful and fearless enough, expressly absolves Dry den as be- 
ing not only innocent, but ignorant of the whole matter. 
However, Rochester chose to identify him as the author, 
and in letters still extant almost expressly states his belief 
in the fact, and threatens to " leave the repartee to Black 
Will with a cudgel." On the 18th December, as Dryden 
was going home at night, through Rose Alley, Covent 
Garden, he was attacked and beaten by masked men. 
Fifty pounds reward (deposited at what is now called 
Childs' Bank) was offered for the discovery of the offend- 
ers, and afterwards a pardon was promised to the actual 
criminals if they would divulge the name of their employ- 
er, but nothing came of it. The intelligent critics of the 
time affected to consider the matter a disgrace to Dryden, 
and few of the subsequent attacks on him fail to notice 
it triumphantly. How frequent those attacks soon be- 
came the next chapter will show. 



CHAPTER ly. 

SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 

In the year 1680 a remarkable change came over thw char- 
acter of Dryden's work. Had he died in this year (and he 
had already reached an age at which many men's work is 
done) he would not at the present time rank very high even 
among the second class of English poets. In pure poe- 
try he had published nothing of the slightest consequence 
for fourteen years, and though there was much admirable 
work in his dramas, they could as wholes only be praised 
by allowance. Of late years, too, he had given up the 
style — rhymed heroic drama — which he had specially 
made his own. He had been for some time casting about 
for an opportunity of again taking up strictly poetical 
work ; and, as usually happens with the favourites of fort- 
une, a better opportunity than any he could have elaborated 
for himself was soon presented to him. The epic poem 
which, as he tells us, he intended to write would doubtless 
have contained many fine passages and much splendid 
versification ; but it almost certainly would not have been 
the best thing in its kind even in its own language. The 
series of satirical and didactic poems which, in the space 
of less than seven years, he was now to produce, occupies 
the position* which the epic would almost to a certainty 
have failed to attain. Not only is there riothing better 



72 DRYDEN. [chap. 

of their own kind in English, but it may almost be said 
that there is nothing better in any other literary language. 
Satire, argument, and exposition may possibly be half- 
spurious kinds of poetry — that is a question which need 
not be argued here. But among satirical and didactic 
poems Absalom and Achitopkel, The Medal, Macjlecknoe, 
Reliyio Laid, The Hind and the Panther, hold the first 
place in company with very few rivals. In a certain kind 
of satire to be defined presently they have no rival at all ; 
and in a certain kind of argumentative exposition they 
have no rival except in Lucretius. 

It is probable that, until he was far advanced in middle 
life, Dryden had paid but little attention to political and 
religious controversies, though he was well enough versed 
in their terms, and had a logical and almost scholastic 
mind. I have already endeavoured to show the unlikeli- 
ness of his ever having been a very fervent Roundhead, 
and I do not think that there is much more probability 
of his having been a very fervent Royalist. His literary 
work, his few friendships, and the tavern-coffeehouse life 
which took up so much of the time of the men of that 
day, probably occupied him sufficiently in the days of his 
earlier manhood. He was loyal enough, no doubt, not 
merely in lip-loyalty, and was perfectly ready to furnish 
an Amhoyna or anything else that was wanted; but for 
the first eighteen years of Charles the Second's reign, the 
nation at large felt little interest, of the active kind, in po- 
litical questions. Dryden almost always reflected the sym- 
pathies of the nation at large. The Popish Plot, however, ' 
and the dangerous excitement which the misgovern rn^rit of ' 
Charles, on the one hand, and the machinations of ShaftfeS' ■ 
bury, on the other, produced, found him at an age when ^ 
serious subjects are at any rate, by courtesy, supposed' to ■ 



lY/}i>] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 73 

poises^, gr^^fc^. attractions than they exert in youth. Tra- 
dition h^s it ,tiiat he was more or less directly encouraged 
by Charles to write one, if not two, of the poems which in 
a few months made him the first satirist in Europe. It is 
possible, for Charles had a real if not a very lively interest 
in literature, iw as a sound enough critic in his way,'^nd 
had ^mple shreiwdness to perceive the advantage to his 
own cause which he might gain by enlisting Dryden. 
However this may be, Absalom and Achitophel was pub- 
lished about the middle of November, 1681, a week or so 
befojce the grand jury threw out the bill against Shaftes- 
bury on a charge of high treason. At no time before, 
and hardly at any time since, did party-spirit run higher ; 
and though the immediate object of the poem was defeat- 
ed by the fidelity of the brisk boys of the city to their 
leader, there is no question that the poem worked power- 
fully among the influences which after the most desperate 
struggle, short of open warfare, in which any English sov- 
ereign has ever been engaged, finally won for Charles the 
victory over the Exclusionists, by means at least ostensibly 
constitutional and legitimate. It is, however, with the lit- 
erary rather than with the political aspect of the matter 
that we are here concerned. 

The story of Absalom and Achitophel has obvious capac- 
ities for political adaptation, and it had been more than 
once so used in the course of the century, indeed (it would 
appear), in the course of the actual political struggle in 
which Dryden now engaged. Like many other of the 
greatest writers, Dryden was wont to carry out Moliere's 
principle to the fullest, and to care very little for technical 
originality of plan or main idea. The form which his 
poem ^took was also in many ways suggested by the pre- 
vailing literary tastes of the day. Both in France and in 
F 4* 



1A DRYDEN. /-B [ciuP. 

England the character or portrait, a set d^S*i4^tlo#'«l<^'a 
given person in prose or verse, had for some time been 
fashionable. Clarendon in the one country, Saint Evre- 
mond in the other, had in particular composed prose por- 
traits which have never been surpassed. Dryden, accord- 
ingly, made his poem little more than a string of such 
portraits, connected together by the very slenderest thread 
of narrative, and interspersed with occasional speeches in 
which the arguments of his own side were put in a light 
as favourable, and those of the other in a light as un- 
favourable, as possible. He was always very careless of 
anything like a regular plot for his poems — a carelessness 
rather surprising in a practised writer for the stage. But 
he was probably right in neglecting this point. The sub- 
jects with which he dealt were of too vital an interest to 
his readers to allow them to stay and ask the question, 
whether the poems had a beginning, a middle, and an end. 
Sharp personal satire and biting political denunciation need- 
ed no such setting as this — a setting which to all appear- 
ance Dryden was as unable as he was unwilling to give. 
He could, however, and did, give other things of much 
greater importance. The wonderful command over the 
couplet of which he had displayed the beginnings in his 
early poems, and which had in twenty years of play-writing 
been exercised and developed till its owner was in as thor- 
ough training as a professional athlete, was the first of 
these. The second was a faculty of satire, properly so 
called, which was entirely novel. The third was a faculty 
of specious argument in verse, which, as has been said, no 
one save Lucretius has ever equalled ; and whicli, if it falls 
short of the great Roman's in logical exactitude, hardly 
falls short of it in poetical ornament, and excels it in a 
sort of triumphant vivacity which hurries the reader along, 



i 



rv.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 75 

whether he will or no. All these three gifts are' almost in- 
differently exemplified in the series of poems now under 
discussion, and each of t]^^^;,inay deserve a little consid- 
eration before we proceed' to gis^ie account of the poems 
themselves. 

The versification of English satire before Dryden had 
been almost without exception harsh and rugged. There 
are whole passages of Marston and of Donne, as well as 
more rarely of Hall, which /?an only be recognised for verse 
by the rattle of the rhj'^mes and by a diligent scansion with 
the finger. Something the same, allowing for the influence 
of Waller and his school^ may be said of Marvell and even 
of Oldhani. . Meanwhile, the octosyllabic satire of Cleve- 
land, Butler, and others, though less violently uncouth than 
the decasyllabics, was purposely grotesque. There is some 
difference* of opinion as to how far the heroic satirists them- 
selves wore intentionally rugged. Donne, when he chose, 
could write with., perfect sweetness, and Marston could be 
smooth enough in blank verse. It has been thought that 
some mistaken classical tradition made the early satirists 
adopt their j^w- breaking style, and there may be some- 
thing to be said for this ; but I think that regard must, 
in fairness, also be had to the very imperfect command of 
the opi^let which they possessed. The languid cadence 
of its then ordinary form was unsuited for satire, and the 
satirists had not the art of quickening and varying it. 
—Hence the only resource was to -make it as like prose as 
P^ rssible. But Dryden was in no such case ; his native 
% ^ifts and his enormous practice in play- writing had made 
the couplet as natural a vehicle to him for any form of 
discourse as blank verse or as plain prose. The form of 
t, too, which he had most affected, was specially suited for 
jatire. In the first place, this form had, as has already 



% DRYDEN. [CHA« 

been noted, a remarkably varied cadence ; in the second,; 
its strong antitheses and smart telling hits lent themselves') 
to personal description and attack with consummate ease'. 
There are passages of Dfyden's 'isatires in which everj/ 
couplet has not only the force but the actual sound of a 
slap in the face. The rapidity of movement from on'e 
couplet to the other is another remarkable characteristic. 
Even Pope, master as he was of verse, often fell into the 
fault of isolating his couplets too much, as if he expected 
applause between each, and Wi^hM to give time for it. 
Dryden's verse, on the other hand, strides along with a 
careless Olympian motion, as if the writer were looking 
at his victims rather with a kind of good-humoured scorn 
than with any elaborate triumph. 

This last remark leads us naturally to the second head, 
the peculiar character of Dryden's satire itself. In this re- 
spect it is at least as much distinguished from its prede- 
cessors as in the former. There had been a continuous 
tradition among satirists that they must affect ini men se 
moral indignation at the evils they attacked. Juvenal and 
still more Persius are probably responsible foi* this ; and 
even Dryden's example did not put an end to the practice, 
for in the next century it is found in persons upon whom 
it sits with singular awkwardness — ^^such as Chui-ciliU" and 
Lloyd. Now, this moral indignation, apt to b 
some when the subject is purely ethical — Mars 
ing example of this — becomes quite intolerab 
subject is political. It never does for the poli 
to lose his temper, and to rave and rant and dei 
the air of an inspired prophet. Dry den, and pe 
den alone, has observed this rule. As I have jus 
his manner towards his subjects is that of a co 
ill-humoured scorn. They are great scoundrels 



IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 11 

but they are probably even more contemptible than they 
are vidous. The well-known line — 

" They got a villain, and we lost a fool," 

expresses this attitude admirably, and the attitude in its 
turn explains the frantic rage which Dryden's satire pro- 
duced in his opponents. There is yet another peculiarity 
of this satire in which it stands almost alone. Most satir- 
ists are usually prone to the error of attacking either mere 
types, or else individuals too definitely marked as individ- 
ual«. The first is the fault of Regnier and all the minor 
French satirists ; the second is the fault of Pope. In the 
first case the point and zest of the thing are apt to be lost, 
and the satire becomes a declamation against vice and fol- 
ly in the abstract; in the second case a suspicion of per- 
sonal piqne comes in, and it is felt that the requirement of 
art, the disengagement of the general law from the individ- 
ual instance, is not sufficiently attended to. Regnier per- 
haps only in Macette, Pope perhaps only in Atticus, escape 
this Scylla and this Charybdis ; but Dryden rarely or nev- 
er falls into cither's grasp. His figures are always at once 
types and individuals. Zimri is at once Buckingham and 
the idle grand seigneur who plays at politics and at learn- 
ing ; P. chitophel at once Shaftesbury and the abstract in- 
triguer; Shiinei at once Bethel and the sectarian politician 
of all days. It is to be noticed, also, that in drawing these 
satirical portraits the poet has exercised a singular judgment 
in selecting his traits. If Absalom and Achitophel be com- 
pared with the repliies it called forth, this is especially no- 
ticeable. Shadwell, for instance, in the almost incredibly 
scurrilous libel which he put forth in answer to the Medal, 
accuses Dryden of certain definite misdoings and missay- 
ings, most of which are unbelievable, while others are in- 



78 DRYDEN. [csap. 

conclusive. Dryden, on the other hand, in the character 
of Og, confines himself in the adroitest way to generalities. 
These generalities are not only much more effective, but 
also much more difficult of disproval. When, to recur to 
the already quoted and typical line attacking the unlucky 
Johnson, Dryden says — 

" They got a villain, and we lost a fool," 

it is obviously useless for the person assailed to sit down 
and write a rejoinder tending to prove that he is neither 
one nor the other. He might clear himself from the 
charge of villainy, but only at the inevitable cost of estab- 
lishing that of folly. But when Shadwell, in unquotable 
verses, says to Dryden, on this or that day you did such 
and such a discreditable thing, the reply is obvious. In 
the first place the charge can be disproved ; in the second 
it can be disdained. When Dryden himself makes such 
charges, it is always in a casual and allusive way, as if 
there were no general dissent as to the truth of his alle- 
gation, while he takes care to be specially happy in his 
language. The disgraceful insinuation against Forbes, 
the famous if irreverent dismissal of Lord Howard of 
Escrick — 

" And canting Nadab let oblivion damn, 
Who made new porridge for the paschal lamb," 

justify themselves by their form if not by their matter. 
It has also to be noted that Dryden's facts are rarely dis- 
putable. The famous passage in which Settle and Shad- 
well are yoked in a sentence of discriminating damnation 
is an admirable example of this. It is absolutely true that 
Settle had a certain faculty of writing, though the matter 
of his verse was worthless ; and it is absolutely true that 



ir.J SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 19 

Shadwell wrote worse, and was in some respects a duller 
man, than any person of equal talents placed among Eng- 
lish men of letters. There could not possibly be a more 
complete justification of Macjlecknoe than the victim's 
complaint that "he had been represented as an Irish- 
man, though Dryden knew perfectly well that he had 
only once been in Ireland, and that was but for a few 
hours;" 

Lastly has to be noticed Dryden's singular faculty of 
verse argument. He was, of course, by no means the first 
did*actic poet of talent in England. Sir John Davies is 
usually mentioned specially as his forerunner, and there 
were others who would deserve notice in a critical history 
of English poetry. But Dryden's didactic poems are quite 
unlike anything which came before them, and have never 
been approached by anything that has come after them. 
Doubtless they prove nothing ; indeed, the chief of them, 
The Hind and the Panther, is so entirely desultory that it 
could not prove anything ; but at the same time they have 
a remarkable air of proving something. Dryden had, in 
reality, a considerable touch of the scholastic in his mind. 
He delights at all times in the formulas of the schools, 
and his various literary criticisms are frequently very fair 
specimens of deductive reasoning. The bent of his mind, 
moreover, was of that peculiar kind which delights in ar- 
guing a point. Something of this may be traced in the 
singular variety, not to say inconsistency, even of his liter- 
ary judgments. He sees, for the time being, only the point 
which he has set himself to prove, and is quite careless of 
the fact that he has proved something very different yes- 
terday, and is very likely to prove something different still 
to-morrow. But for the purposes of didactic poetry he 
had special equipments unconnected with his merely logi- 



80 DEYDEN. [^h^^. 

cal power. He was at all times singularly happy fy^.lej*- 
tile in the art of illustration, and of concealing the weak- 
ness of an argument in the most convincing way, by a 
happy simile or jest. He steered clear of the rock on 
which Lucretius has more than once gone nigh to split — 
the repetition of dry formulas and professional terms. In 
the Hind and Panther, indeed, the argument is, in great 
part, composed of narrative and satirical portraiture. The 
Fable of the Pigeons, the Character of the Buzzard, and a 
dozen more such things, certainly prove as little as the 
most determined enemy of the belles lettres could wish. 
-•sBut Religio Laid, which is our best English didactic 
poem, is not open to this charge, and is really a very 
good piece of argument. Weaknesses here and there are, 
of course, adroitly patched over with ornament, but still 
the whole possesses a v^ery fair capacity of holding water. 
Here, too, the peculiar character of Dryden's poetic style 
served him well. He speaks with surely affected depre- 
ciation of the style of the Religio as "unpolished and 
rugged." In reality, it is a model of the plainer sort of 
verse, and nearer to his own admirable prose than anything 
else that can be cited. 

One thing more, and a thing of the greatest importance, 
has to be said about Dryden's satirical poems. There 
never, perhaps, was a satirist who less abused his power for 
personal ends. He only attacked Settle and Shadwell af- 
ter both had assailed him in the most virulent and unpro- 
voked fashion. Many of the minor assailants whom, as 
we shall see, Absalom and Achitophel raised up against 
him, he did not so much as notice. On the other hand, 
no kind of personal grudge can be traced in many of his 
most famous passages. The character of Zirari was not 
only perfectly true and just, but was also a fair literary 



jv.J SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 81 

tit-for-tat in return for the Rehearsal ; nor did Bucking- 
ham's foolish rejoinder provoke the poet to say another 
word. Last of all, in no part of his satires is there the 
slightest reflection on Rochester, notwithstanding the dis- 
graceful conduct of which he had been guilty. Rochester 
was dead, leaving no heirs and very few friends, so that at 
any time during the twenty years which Dry den survived 
him satirical allusion would have been safe and easy. But 
Dryden was far too manly to war with the dead, and far 
too manly even to indulge, as his great follow-er did, in 
vicious flings at the living. 

Absalom and Achitopkel is perhaps, with the exception 
of the St. Cecilia ode, the best known of all Dryden's 
poems to modern readers, and there is no need to give any 
very lengthy account of it, or of the extraordinary skill 
with which Monmouth is treated. The sketch, even now 
about the best existing in prose or verse, of the Popish 
Plot, the character and speeches of Achitophel, the unap- 
proached portrait of Zimri, and the final harangue of 
David, have for generations found their places in every 
book of elegant extracts, either for general or school use. 
But perhaps the most characteristic passage of the whole, 
as indicating the kind of satire which Dryden now intro- 
duced for the first time, is the passage descriptive of 
Shimei — Slingsby Bethel — the Republican sheriff of the 
city : 

" But he, though bad, is followed by a worse, 
The wretch, who heaven's anointed dared to curse; 
Shimei — whose youth did early promise bring 
Of zeal to God, and hatred to his King- 
Did wisely from expensive sins refrain. 
And never broke the Sabbath but for gain : 
Nor ever was he known an oath to vent, 
Or curse, unless against the government. 



82 DHYDEN. [chap. 

Thus heaping wealth, by the most ready way 

Among the Jews, which was to cheat and pray ; 

The City, to reward his pious hate 

Against his master, chose him magistrate. 

His hand a vare of justice did uphold, 

His neck was loaded with a chain of gold. 

During his office treason was no crime, 

The sons of Belial had a glorious time : 

For Shimei, though not prodigal of pelf. 

Yet loved his wicked neighbour as himself. 

When two or three were gathered to declaim 

Against the monarch of Jerusalem, 

Shimei was always in the midst of them : 

And, if they cursed the King when he was by, 

Would rather curse than break good company. 

If any durst his factious friends accuse, 

He packed a jury of dissenting Jews, 

Whose fellow-feeling in the godly cause 

Would free the suffering saint from human laws : 

For laws are only made to punish those 

Who serve the King, and to protect his foes. 

If any leisure time he had from power. 

Because 'tis sin to misemploy an hour, 

His business was, by writing to persuade. 

That kings Were useless, and a clog to trade : 

And that his noble style he might refine. 

No Rechabite more shunned the fumes of wine. 

Chaste were his cellars, and his shrieval board 

The grossness of a city feast abhorred : 

His cooks with long disuse their trade forgot; 

Cool was his kitchen, though his brains were hot. 

Such frugal virtue malice may accuse. 

But sure 'twas necessary to the Jews : 

For towns, once burnt, such magistrates require. 

As dare not tempt God's providence by fire. 

With spiritual food he fed his servants well. 

But free from flesh, that made the Jews rebel: 

And Moses' laws he held in more account. 

For forty days of fasting in the mount." 



IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 83 

There had been nothing in the least like this, before. 
The prodigality of irony, the sting in the tail of every 
couplet, the ingenuity by which the odious charges are 
made against the victim in the very words almost of the 
phrases which his party were accustomed to employ, and 
above all the polish of the language and the verse, and the 
tone of half -condescending banter, were things of which 
that time had no experience. The satire w^as as bitter as 
Butler's, but less grotesque and less laboured. 

It was not likely that at a time when pamphlet-writing 
was the chief employment of professional authors, and 
when the public mind was in the hottest state of excite- 
ment, such an onslaught as Absalom and Achitophel should 
remain unanswered. In three weeks from its appearance 
a parody, entitled Towser the Second, attacking Dryden, 
was published, the author of which is said to have been 
Henry Care. A few days later Buckingham proved, 
with tolerable convincingness, how small had been his 
own share in the Rehearsal, by putting forth some Po- 
etical Reflections of the dreariest kind. Him followed an 
anonymous Nonconformist with A Whip for the FooVs 
Back, a performance which exposed his own back to a 
much more serious flagellation in the preface to the 
Medal. Next came Samuel Pordage's Azaria and Hushai. 
This work of " Lame Mephibosheth, the wizard's son," is 
weak enough in other respects, but shows that Dryden had 
already taught several of his enemies how to write. Last- 
ly, Settle published Absalom Senior, perhaps the worst of 
all the replies, though containing evidences of its author's 
faculty for "rhyming and rattling." Of these and of sub- 
sequent replies Scott has given ample selections, ample, 
that is to say, for the general reader. But the student of 
Dryden can hardly appreciate his author fully, or estimate 



84 DRYDEN. [chap. 

the debt whicTi the English language owes to him, unless 
he has read at last some of them in full. 

The popularity of Absalom and Achitophel was immense, 
and its sale rapid; but the main object, the overthrowing 
of Shaftesbury, was not accomplished, and a certain tri- 
umph was even gained for that turbulent leader by the fail- 
ure of the prosecution against him. This failure was cele- 
brated by the striking of a medal with the legend Laeta- 
mur. Thereupon Dry den wrote the Medal. A very 
precise but probably apocryphal story is told by Spence 
of its origin. Charles, he says, was walking with Dryden 
in the Mall, and said to him, " If I were a poet, and I think 
I am poor enough to be one, I would write a poem on such 
a subject in such a manner," giving him at the same time 
hints for the Medal, which, when finished, was rewarded 
with a hundred broad pieces. The last part of the story is 
not very credible, for the king was not extravagant towards 
literature. The first is unlikely, because he was, in the first 
place, too much of a gentleman to reproach a man to whom 
he was speaking with the poverty of his profession ; and, 
in the second, too shrewd not to see that he laid himself 
open to a damaging repartee. However, the story is not 
impossible, and that is all that can be said of it. The 
Medal came out in March, 1682. It is a much shorter and 
a much graver poem than Absalom and Achitophel, extend- 
ing to little more than 300 lines, and containing none of 
the picturesque personalities which had adorned its pred- 
ecessor. Part of it is a bitter invective against Shaftes- 
bury, part an argument as to the unfitness of republican 
institutions for England, and the rest an " Address^to the 
Whigs," as the prose preface is almost exclusively^ . The 
language of the poem is nervous, its versification less live- 
ly than that of Absalom and Achitophel, but not less care- 



IV.] SATIRICAL AN6 ^ll)ACTIC POEMS. 85 

ful. It is noticeable, too, tniat^tM^Jire«faZ contains a line 
of fourteen syllables, 

" Thou leap'st o'er all eternal truths in thy Pindaric way." 

The Alexandrine was already a favourite device of Dryden's, 
but he has seldom elsewhere tried the seven-foot verse as a 
variation. Strange to say, it is far from inharmonious in 

" its place, and has a certain connexion with the sense, though 
the example certainly cannot be recommended for univer- 
sal imitation. I cannot remember anv instance in another 
poet of such a licence except the well-known three in the 
Revolt of Islarriy which may be thought to be covered by 
Shelley's prefatory apology. 

The direct challenge to the Whigs which the preface 
contained was not likely to go unanswered ; and, indeed, 
Dryden had described in it with exact irony the character 
of the replies he received. Pordage returned to the charge 
with the Medal Reversed ; the admirers of Somers hope 
that he did not write Dryden's Satire to his Muse ; and 
there were many others. But one of them, the Medal of 
John Ba?jes, is, of considerably greater importance. It was 
written by Thomas Shadwell, and is perhaps the most scur- 
rilous piece of ribaldry which has ever got itself quoted in 
English literature. The author gives a life of Dryden, ac- 
cusing him pell-mell of all sorts of disgraceful conduct and 
unfortunate experiences. His adulation of Oliver, his puri- 
tanic relations, his misfortunes at Cambridge, his marriage, 
his intrigues with Mrs. Reeve, &c., &c., are all raked up oi 
invented for the purpose of throwing obloquy on him 
The attack passed all bounds of decency, especially as i 
had not been provoked by any personality towards Shac 

well, and tOt^ once Dryden resolved to make an example c 

his assailant. ''^^'' ' ' 



. .iwiuas Sliadw^llviiw^^ J aj Norfolk man, and about ten 
>."ai"s Dryden's junior. Ever since the year 1668 he had 
iM'en writing plays (chiefly comedies) and hanging abont 
town, and Dryden and he had been in a manner friends. 
They had joined Crowne in the task of writing down the 
Empress of Morocco, and it does not appear that Dryden 
had ever given Shadwell any direct cause of offence. Shad- 
well, however, who was exceedingly arrogant, and appar- 
ently jealous of Dryden's acknowledged position as leader 
of the English drama, took more than one occasion of sneer- 
ing at Dryden, and especially at his critical prefaces. Not 
long before the actual declaration of war Shadwell had re- 
ceived a prologue from Dryden, and the outbreak itself wa§ 
due to purely political causes, though no doubt Shadwell, 
who was a sincere Whig and Protestant, was very glad to 
pour out his pent-up literary jealousy at the same time. 
The personality of his attack on Dryden was, however, in 
the last degree unwise ; for the house in which he lived 
was of glass almost all over. His manners are admitted 
to have been coarse and brutal, his conversation unclean, 
his appearance uninviting; nor was his literary personal- 
ity safer from attack. He had taken Ben Jonson for his 
model, and any reader of his comedies must admit that he 
had a happy knack of detecting or imagining the oddities 
which, after Ben's example, he called "humours." The 
Sullen Lovers is in this way a much more genuinely amus- 
ing play than any of Dryden's, and the Squire of Alsatia, 
Bury Fair, Epsom Wells, the Virtuoso, &c., are comedies 
of manners by no means unimportant for the social history 
of the time. But whether it was owing to haste, as Roch- 
ester pretended, or, as Dryden would have it, to certain in- 
tellectual incapacities, there can be no doubt tWiat nobody 
ever made less use of his faculties than ^»:jhadwell. His 



iv.j SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 87 

work is always disgraceful as writing; he seems to have 
been totally destitute of any critical faculty, and he mixes 
up what is really funny with the dullest and most weari- 
some folly and ribaldry. He was thus given over entirely 
into Dryden's hands, and the unmatched satire of Mac- 
Fiecknoe was the result. 

Flecknoe, whom but for this work no one would ever 
have inquired about, was, and had been for some time, a 
stock-subject for allusive satire. He was an Irish priest 
who had died not long before, after writing a little good 
verse and a great deal of bad. He had paid compliments 
to Dryden, and ther6 is no reason, to suppose that Dryden 
had any enmity towards him ; his part, indeed, is simply 
representative, and the satire is reserved for Shadwell. 
Well as they are known, the first twenty or thirty lines 
of the poem must be quoted once more, for illustration 
of Dryden's satirical faculty is hardly possible without; 
them : 

"All human things are subject to decay, 
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey. 
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young 
Was called to empire, and had governed long; 
. In prose and verse was owned without dispute, 
Through all the realms of Nonsense, absolute. 
This aged prince, now flourishing in peace, 
And blessed with issue of a large increase. 
Worn out with business, did at length debate 
To settle the succession of the state ; 
i^.ff, ' •' And, pondering which of all his sons was fit 
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit. 
Cried — ' 'Tis resolved ! for nature pleads, that he 
Should only rule, who most resembles me. 
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, 
Mature in dulness from his tender years ; 
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he 



88 UKYDEN. [chap. 

Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. 

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, 

But Shadwell never deviates into sense. 

Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, 

Strike through and make a lucid interval ; 

But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray, 

His rising fogs prevail upon the day. 

Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye, 

And seems designed for thoughtless majesty ; 

Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain, 

And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.' " 

MacFlecknoe was published in October, 1682, but Diy- 
den had not done with Shadwell. A month later came 
out the second part of Absalom and AcJiitophel, in which 
Nahum Tate took up, the story. Tate copied the versi^- 
cation of his master with a good deal of success, though, 
as it is known that Dryden gave strokes almost all through 
^ the poem, it is difficult exactly to apportion the other lau- 
reate's part. But the second part of Absalom and Achit- 
(fphel would assuredly never be opened were it not for a 
long passage of about 200 lines, which is entirely Dry- 
den's, and which contains some of his very best work. 
Unluckily it contains also some of Ms greatest licences of 
expression, to which he was probably provoked by the un- 
paralleled language which, as has been said, Shadwell and 
others had used to him. The 200 lines which he gave 
Tate are one string of characters, each more savage and 
more masterly than the last. Ferguson, Forbes, and John- 
son are successively branded ; Pordage has his ten syllables 
of immortalizing contempt ; and then come the famous 
characters of Doeg (Settle) and Og (Shadwell) — 

*' Two fools that crutch their feeble sense on verse, 
Who by my muse to all succeeding times 
Shall live, in spite of their own doggrel rhymes," 



IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 89 

The coarseness of speech before alluded to makes it im- 
possible to quote these characters as a whole, but a cento 
is fortunately possible with little loss of vigour. 

" Doeg, though without knowing how or why, 
Made still a blundering kind of melody ; 
Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin, 
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in ; 
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, 
And, in one word, heroically mad, 
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell, 
^ • But fagoted his notions as they fell, 

And, if they rhymed and rattled, all was well. 
^- Railing in other men may be a crime, 

But ought to pass for mere instinct in him ; 

Instinct he follows, and no farther knows. 

For, to write verse with him is to tramprose; 

'Twere pity treason at his door to lay. 

Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key; 

Let him rail on, let his invective muse 

Have four-and-twenty letters to abuse. 

Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense, 

Indict him of a capita,l offence. 

In fire-works give him leave to vent his spite, 

Those are the only serpents he can write ; 

The height of his ambition is, we know, 

But to be master of a puppet-show ; 

On that one stage his works may yet appear. 

And a month's harvest keep him all the year. 

" Now stop your noses, readers, all and some. 
For here's a tun of midnight work to gome, 
Og from a treason-tavern rolling home. 
' Round as a globe, and liquored every chink, 
; Goodly and great he sails behind his link. 

Tith all this bulk there's nothing lost in Og, 

or every inch, that is not fool, is rogue. 
iThe midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, 
ith this prophetic blessing — Be thou dull ! 
5 




90 DRYDEN. [chaj». 

Drink, swear, and roar; forbear no lewd delight 03 aiJ'i' 

Fit for thy bulk, do anything but write. ' " ■ 

Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men, 

A strong nativity — but for the pen ; 

Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink. 

Still thou mayest live, avoiding pen and ink. 

I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain, 

For treason, botched in rhyme, wilj be thy bane ; 

Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck, 

'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck. 

Why should thy metre good King David blast ? 

A psalm of his will surely be thy last. 

A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull 

For writing treason, and for writing dull ; 

To die for faction is a common evil. 

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil. 

Hadst thou the glories of thy king exprest. 

Thy praises had been satire at the best ; 

But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed. 

Hast shamefully defied the Lord's anointed : 

I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes, 

For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes ? 

But of King David's foes, be this the doom. 

May all be like the young man Absalom ; 

And for my foes may this their blessing be, 

To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee." 

No one, I think, can fail to recognise here the qualities 
which have already been set forth as specially distinguish- 
ing- Dryden's satire, the fund of truth at the bottom of it, 
the skilful adjustment of the satire so as to make faults of 
the merits which are allowed, the magnificent force and 
variety of the verse, and the constant maintenance of a 
kind of superior contempt never degenerating into mere 
railing, or losing its superiority in petty spite. The last 
four verses in especial might almost be taken as a model 
of satirical verse. 



IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 91 

Tftese verses were the last that Dryden wrote in the 
directly patirical way. His four great poems — the two 
parLs of Absalom and Achitophel, the Medal, and Mac- 
Flecknoe, had been produced in rather more than a year, 
and, high as was his literary position before, had exalted 
him infinitely higher. From this time forward there could 
be no doubt at all of his position, with no second at any 
moderate distance, at the head of living English men of 
letters. He was now to earn a new title to this position. 
Almost simultaneously with the, second part of Absalom 
and Achitophel appeared Religio Laid. 

Scott has described Religio Laid as one of the most 
admirable poems in the language, which in some respects 
it undoubtedly is ; but it is also one of the most singular. 
That a man who had never previously displayed any par- 
ticular interest in theological questions, and who had reach- 
ed the age of fifty -one, with a reputation derived, until 
quite recently, in the main from the composition of loose 
plays, should appear before his public of pleasure-seekers 
with a serious argument in verse on the credibility of the 
Christian religion, and the merits of the Anglican form 
of doctrine and church government, would nowadays be 
something more than a nine days' wonder. In Dryden's 
time it was somewhat less surprising. The spirit of theo- 
logical controversy was bred in the bone of the seventeenth 
certtury. It will always remain an instance of the subor- 
dination in Macaulay of the judicial to the advocating fac- 
ulty, that he who knew the time so well should have ad- 
duced the looseness of Dryden's plays as an argument 
againi^t the sincerity of his conversion. It is quite certain 
that James the Second was both a man of loose life and 
of thoroughly sincere religious belief ; it is by no means 
certain that his still more profligate brother's unbelief was 



DRY DEN. [chap. 

, mere assumption, and generally it may be noted that 
)iograpl:iies of tbe time never seem to infer any con- 
..jon between irregularity of life and unsoundness of re- 
ligious faith. I have already shown some cause for dis- 
believing the stories, or rather the assertions, of Dryden's 
profligacy, though, even these would not be conclusive 
against his sincerity ; but I believe that it would be diffi- 
cult to trace any very active concern in him for things 
religious before the Popish Plot. Various circumstances 
already noticed may then have turned his mind to the sub- 
ject, and that active and vigorous mind when it once at- 
tacked a subject rarely deserted it. Consistency was in no 
matter Dryden's great characteristic, and the arguments of 
JReligio Laid are not more inconsistent with the arguments 
of The Hind and the Panther than the handling of the 
question of rhymed plays in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy 
is with the arguments against them in the prefaces and 
dissertations subsequent to Aurengzehe. 

It has sometimes been sought to give Religio Laid a 
political as well as a religious sense, and to connect it in 
this way w'ith the series of political satires, with the Duke 
of Guise^ and with the subsequent Hind and Panther. The 
connexion, how^ever, seems to me to be faint. The strug- 
gles of the Popish Plot had led to the contests on the Ex- 
clusion Bill on the one hand, and they had reopened the 
controversial question between the Churches of England 
and Rome on the other. They had thus in different; ways 
given rise to Absalom and Achitophel and to Religio Laid^ 
but the two poems have no community but a community 
of origin. Indeed, the suspicion of any political design 
in Religio Laid is not only groundless but contradictory. 
The views of James on the subject were known to every 
one, and those of Charles himself are not likely to have 



iv.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. l'> 

been wholly bidden from an assiduous follower of tbe court, 
and a friend of tbe king's greatest intimates, like Dryden. 
Still less is it necessary to take account of the absurd sug- 
gostion that Dryden wrote the poem as a stepping-stone to 
orders and to ecclesiastical preferment. He has definitely 
denied that he bad at any time thoughts of entering the 
church, and such thoughts are certainly not likely to have 
occurred to him at tbe age of fifty. The poem, therefore, 
as it seems to me, jnust be regarded as a genuine produc- 
tion, expressing tbe author's first thoughts on a subject 
which bad just presented itself to him as interesting and 
important. Such first thoughts in a mind like Dry den's, 
which was by no means a revolutionary mind, and which 
was disposed to accept tbe church as part and parcel of 
the Tory system of principles, were pretty certain to take 
tbe form of an apologetic harmonizing of difficulties and 
doubts. Tbe author must have been familiar with the 
usual objections of the persons vaguely called Hobbists, 
and with the counter - objections of the Romanists. He 
takes them both, and be makes tbe best of them. 

In its form and arrangement Religio Laid certainly de- 
serves tbe praise which critics have given it. Dryden's 
overtures are very generally among the happiest parts of 
his poems, and tbe opening ten or twelve lines of this 
poem are among his very best. Tbe bold evjamhement of 
tbe first two couplets, with the striking novelty of cadence 
given by tbe sharply cut ccesura of tbe third line, is one 
of his best metrical effects, and the actual picture of tbe 
cloudy night-sky and the wandering traveller matches the 
technical beauty of the v^erse. Tbe rest of the poem is 
studiously bare of ornament, and almost exclusively argu- 
mentative. There is and could be nothing specially novel 
or extraordinarily forcible in tbe arguments ; but they are 



€4 DRYDEN. [c&.« 

put with that ease and apparent cogency which have been 
already remarked upon as characterizing all Dryden's di- 
dactic work. The poem is not without touches of humour, 
and winds up with a characteristic but not ill-humoured 
fling at the unhappy Shadwell. 

Dryden's next productions of importance were two odes 
of the so-called Pindaric kind. The example of Cowley 
had made this style very popular ; but Dryden himself had 
not practised it. The years 1685-6 gave him occasion to 
do so. His Threnodia Augustalis, or funeral poem on 
Charles the Second, may be taken as the chief official pro- 
duction of his laureateship. The difficulties of such per- 
formances are well known, and the reproaches brought 
against their faults are pretty well stereotyped. Threno- 
dia Augustalis is not exempt from the faults of its kind ; 
but it has merits which for that kind are decidedly unu- 
sual. The stanza Which so adroitly at once praises and 
satirizes Charles's patronage of literary men is perhaps the 
best, and certainly the best known ; but the termination 
is also fine. Of very different merit, however, is the Ode 
to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew. This elegy is 
among the best of many noble funeral poems which Dry- 
den wrote. The few lines on the Marquis of Winchester, 
the incomparable address to Oldham — " Farewell, too little 
and too lately known" — and at a later date the translated 
epitaph on Claverhouse, are all remarkable ; but the Kil- 
legrew elegy is of far greater importance. It is curious 
that in these days of selections no one has attempted a 
collection of the best regular and irregular odes in English. 
There are not many of them, but a small anthology could 
be made, reaching from Milton to Mr. Swinburne, which 
would contain some remarkable poetry. Among these 
the ode to x\nne Killegrew would assuredly hold a high 



wJ 



SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 



95 



place. Johnson pronounced it the noblest in the language, 
and in his time it certainly was, unless Lycidas be called 
an ode. Since its time there has been Wordsworth's great 
immortality ode, and certain beautiful but fragmentary 
pieces of Shelley which might be so classed ; but till our 
own days nothing else which can match this. The first 
stanza may be pronounced absolutely faultless, and inca- 
pable of improvement. As a piece of concerted music in 
verse it has not a superior, and Warton's depreciation of it 
is a curious instance of the lack of catholic taste which 
has so often marred English criticism of poetry : 



" Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies, 

Made in the last promotion of the blessed ; 
Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise, 
In spreading branches more sublimely rise, 

Rich with immortal green above the rest : 
Whether, adopted to some neighbouring star, 
Thou rollest above us, in thy wandering race, 

Or, in procession fixed and regular, 

Movest with the heaven's majestic pace ; 

Or, called to more superior bUss, 
Thou treadest with seraphims the vast abyss : 
Whatever happy region is thy place. 
Cease thy celestial song a little space ; 
Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine. 

Since Heaven's eternal year is thine.* 
Hear, then, a mortal Muse thy praise rehearse, 

In no ignoble verse ; 
But such as thy own voice did practise here, 
W/'hen thy first fruits of Poesy were- given, 
7tO make thyself a welcome inmate there ; 

While yet a young probationer, 
And candidate of heaven." 



,«v^»' 




lese fjmaller pieces were followed at some interval by 
the remairkable poem which is Dryden's chief work, if 



96 DRYDEN. '^ITAa '^^^^^ 

bulk and originality of plan are taken'^ifi^-^6bmid\^^on. 
There is a tradition as to the place of composition of The 
Hind and the Panther, which in many respects deserves 
to be true, though there is apparently no direct testimo- 
ny to its truth. It is said to have been written at Rush- 
ton not far from Kettering, in the poet's native county. 
Rush ton had been (thoagh it had passed from them at 
this time) the seat of the Treshams, one of the staunchest 
families to the old faith which Dryden had just embraced. 
They had held another seat in Northamptonshire — Lyve- 
den, within a few miles of Aldwinlde and of all the scenes 
of the poet's youth ; and both at Lyveden and Rushton, 
architectural evidences of their devotion to the cause sur- 
vive in the shape of buildings covered with symbolical 
carvings. The neighbourhood of Rushton, too, is singu- 
larly consonant to the scenery of the poem. It lay just 
on the southern fringe of the great forest of Rocking- 
ham, and the neighbourhood is still wonderfully timbered, 
though most of the actual wood owes its existence to the 
planting energy of Duke John of Montagu, half a century 
after Dryden's time. It would certainly not have been 
easy to conceive a better place for the conception and ex- 
ecution of this sylvan poem ; but, as a matter of fact, it 
seems impossible to obtain any definite evidence of the 
connexion between the two. 

The Hind and the Panther is in plan a sort of combina- 
tion of Absalom and Achitophel, and of Religio Laid, but 
its three parts ai'c by no means homogeneous. The first 
part, whicb is perhaps, on the whole, the best, contains the 
well-known apportionment of the characters of different 
beasts to the different churches and sects ; the second con- 
tains the major part of the controversy between the Hind 
and the Panther ; the third, which is as long as th^ other 



IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 97 

two put together, continues this controversy, but before 
very long diverges into allegorical and personal satire. 
The story of the Swallows, which the Panther tells, is one 
of the liveliest of all Dryden's pieces of narration, and it 
is not easy to give the palm between it and the Hind's 
retort, the famous fable of the Doves, in which Burnet is 
caricatured with hardly less vigour and not much less truth 
than Buckingham and Shadwell in the satires proper. 
This told, the poem ends abruptly. 

The Hind and the Panther was certain to provoke con- 
troversy, especially from the circumstances, presently to 
be discussed, under which it was written. Dryden had 
two points especially vulnerable, the one being personal, 
the other literary. It was inevitable that his argument in 
Religio Laici should be contrasted with his argument in 
The Hind and the Panther. It was inevitable, on the 
other hand, that the singularities of construction in the 
latter poem should meet with animadversion. No de- 
fender of The Hind and the Panther, indeed, has ever at- 
tempted to defend it as a regular or classically proportion- 
ed piece of work. Its main theine is, as always with Dry- 
den, merely a canvas whereon to embroider all sorts of 
episodes, digressions, and ornaments. Yet his adversaries, 
in their blind animosity, went a great deal too far in the 
matter of condemnation, and showed themselves entirelv 
ignorant of the history and requirements of allegory in 
general, and the beast -fable in particular. Dryden, like 
many other great men of letters, had an admiration for 
the incomparable story of Reynard the fox. It is charac- 
teristic, both of his enemies and of the age, that this was 
made a serious argument against him. This is specially 
done in a celebrated little pamphlet which has perhaps had 
the honour of being more overpraised than anything else 
5* 



98 DKYDEN. [chap.it. 

of its kind in Englisli literature. If any one wishes to 
appraise the value of the story that Dryden was serious- 
ly vexed by The Hind and the Panther transversed to the 
Story of the City and Country Mouse, he cannot do better 
than read that production. It is difficult to say what was 
or was not unworthy of Montague, whose published poems 
certainly do not authorize us to say that he wrote below 
hiinseif on this occasion, but it assuredly is in the high- 
est degree unworthy of Prior. Some tolerable parody of 
Dryden's own work, a good deal of heav}^ joking closely 
modelled on the Rehearsal, and assigning to Mr. Bayes 
plenty of "i'gads" and the like catchwords, make up the 
staple of this piece, in which Mr. Christie has discovered 
"true wit," and the Quarterly Reviewer already cited, 
" exquisite satire." Among the severest of Messrs. Mon- 
tague and Prior's strictures is a sarcastic reference to Rey- 
nard the fox. What was good enough for Dryden, for 
Goethe, and for Mr. Carlyle was childish rubbish to these 
brisk young critics. The story alluded to says that Dry- 
den wept at the attack, and complained that two young 
fellows to whom he had been civil should thus have treated 
an old man. * Now Dryden certainly did not consider him- 
self an old man at this time, and he had " seen many others," 
as an admirable Gallicism has it, in the matter of attacks. 

One more poem, and one only, remains to be noticed in 
this division. This was the luckless Britannia, Rediviva, 
written on the bii'th of the most ill-starred of all Princes 
of Wales, born in the purple. It is in couplets, and as no 
work of Dryden's written at this time could be worthless, 
it contains some vigorous verse, but on the whole it is by 
far the worst of his serious, poems ; and it was no mis- 
fortune for his fame that the Revolution left it out of 
print for the rest of the author's life. 



CHAPTER V. 

LIFF FROM 1680 TO 1688. 

That portion of Diyden's life which extends from the 
Popish Plot to the Revolution is of so much more impor- 
tance for the estimate of his personal character, ^s well as 
for that of his literary genius, than any other period of 
equal length, that it has seemed well to devote a separate 
chapter to the account and discussion of it. The question 
of Dryden's conversion, its motives and its sincerity, has 
of itself been more discussed than any other point in his 
life, and on the opinions to be formed of it must depend 
the opinion which, on the whole, we form of him as a 
man. According to one view his conduct during these 
years places him among the class which paradox delights 
to describe as the " greatest an-d meanest of mankind," the 
men who compensate for the admiral)le qualities ojLtheir 
heads by the despicable infirmities of their hearts. Ac- 
cording to another, his conduct, if not altogether wise, 
contains nothing discreditable to him, and some things 
which may be reasonably described as very much the con- 
trary. Twenty years of play-writing had, in all probabil- 
ity, somewhat disgusted Dryden with the stage, and his 
Rose-Alley misfortune had shown him that even a scrupu- 
lous abstinence from meddling in politics or in personal 
satire would not save him from awkward consequences. 



100 DRYDEN". ' [chap. 

His lucrative contract with the players had, beyond all 
doubt, ceased, and his official salaries, as we shall see, were 
paid with the usual irregularity. At the same time, as has 
been already pointed out, his turn of thought probably led 
him to take more interest in practical politics and in relig- 
ious controversy than had been previously the case. The 
additional pension, which as we have seen he had received, 
made his nominal income sufficient, and instead of writing; 
plays invita Minerva he took to writing satires and argu- 
mentative pieces to please himself. Other crumbs of royal 
favour fell to his lot from time to time. The broad pieces 
received for the Medal are very probably apocryphal, but 
there is no doubt that his youngest son received, in Feb- 
ruary, 1683, a presentation to the Charterhouse from the 
king. This presentation it was which he was said to have 
received from Shaftesbury, as the price of the mitigating 
lines (" Yet fame deserved — easy of access ") inserted in 
the later edition of Absalom and Achitophel. He was 
also indefatigable in undertaking and performing minor 
literary work of various kinds, which will be noticed later. 
Nor, indeed, could he afford to be idle ; his pensions were 
often unpaid, and it is just after the great series of his 
satires closed that we get a glimpse of this fact. A letter 
is extant to Rochester — Hyde, not Wilmot — complaining 
of long arrears, and entreating some compensation in the 
shape of a place in the Customs, or the Excise, besides 
an instalment at least of the debt. It is this letter which 
contains the well-known phrase, "It is enough for one age 
to have neglected Mr. Cowley and starved Mr. Butler." As 
far as documentary evidence goes, the answer to the appeal 
was a Treasury warrant for 75/., the arrears being over 
1000/., and an appointment to a collectorship of Customs 
in the port of London, with unknown emoluments. The 



v.j LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 101 

only definite sura mentioned is a nominal one of 61. a year 
as collector of duties on cloth. But it is not likely that 
cloth was the only subject of Dryden's labours, and in 
those days the system of fees and perquisites flourished. 
This Customs appointment was given in 1683. 

To the condition of Dryden's sentiments in the last 
years of Charles' reign Religio Laid must be taken as the 
surest, and, indeed, as the only clue. There is no proof 
that this poem was composed to serve any political pur- 
pose, and indeed it could not have served any, neither 
James nor Charles being likely to be propitiated by a de- 
fence, however moderate and rationalizing, of the Church 
of England. It is not dedicated to any patron, and seems 
to have been an altogether spontaneous expression of what 
was passing in the poet's mind. A careful study of the 
poem, instead of furnishing arguments against the sincer- 
ity of his subsequent conduct, furnishes, I think, on the 
contrary, arguments which are very strongly in its favour. 
It could have, as has just been said, no purpose of pleasing 
a lay patron, for there was none to be pleased by it. It is 
not at all likely to have commended itself to a clerical pa- 
tron, because of its rationalizing tone, its halting adop- 
tion of the Anglican Church as a kind of makeshift, and its 
heterodox yearnings after infallibility. These last, indeed, 
are among the most strongly-marked features of the piece, 
and point most clearly in the direction which the poet 
afterwards took. 

" Such an omniscient church we wish indeed, 
'Twere worth both Testaments, cast in the Creed," 

is an awkward phrase for a sound divine, or a dutifully 
acquiescing layman ; but it is exactly the phrase which 
might be expected from a man who was on the slope from 



102 DRYDEN. [chap. 

placid caring for none of these things to a more or less 
fervent condition of membership of an infallible church. 
The tenor of the whole poem, as it seems to me, is the 
same. The author, in his character of high Tory and 
orthodox Englishman, endeavours to stop himself at the 
point which the Anglican Church marks with a thus far 
and no farther; but, in a phrase which has no exact Eng- 
lish equivalent, nous le voyons venir. . It is quite evident 
that if he continues to feel anything like a lively interest 
in the problems at stake, he will go farther still. He did 
go farther, and has been accordingly railed against for 
many generations. But I do not hesitate to put the ques- 
tion to the present generation in a very concrete form. 
Is Dryden's critic nowadays prepared to question the sin- 
cerity of Cardinal Newman ? If he is, I have no objection 
to his questioning the sincerity of Dryden. But what is 
sauce for the nineteenth-century goose is surely sauce for 
the seventeenth- century gander. The post -conversion 
writings of the Cardinal are not less superficially incon- 
sistent with the Tracts for the Times and the Oxford 
Sermons, than the Hind and the Panther is with Religio 
Laid. 

A hyperbole has been in some sort necessary in order to 
rebut the very unjust aspersions which two of the most 
popular historians of the last thirty years have thrown on 
Dryden. But I need hardly say, that though the glory of 
Oxford in the first half of the nineteenth century is a fair 
argumentative parallel to the glory of Cambridge in the 
second half of the seventeenth, the comparison is not in- 
tended to be forced. I believe Dryden to have been, in 
the transactions of the years 1685-7, thoroughly sincere 
as far as conscious sincerity went, but of a certain amount 
of unconscious insincerity I am by no means disposed to 



v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 103 

acquit 'him. If I judge his character aright, no Englisli 
man of letters was ever more thoroughly susceptible to 
the spirit and influence of his time. Dryden was essen- 
tially a literary man, and was disposed rather to throw 
himself into the arms of any party than into those of one 
so hopelessly unliterary as the ultra-Liberal and ultra-Prot- 
estant party of the seventeenth century was. He was, 
moreover, a professed servant of the public, or as we should 
put it in these days, he had the journalist spirit. Fortu- 
nately — and it is for everybody who has to do with litera- 
ture'the most fortunate sign of the times — it is not now 
necessary for any one to do violence to a single opinion, 
even to a single crotchet of his own, in order to make his 
living by his pen. It was not so in Dryden's days, and 
it is fully believable that a sense that he was about to be 
on the winning side may have assisted his rapid determina- 
tion from Hobbism or Halifaxism to Romanist orthodoxy. 
I am the more disposed to this allowance because it seems 
to me that Dryden's principal decrier was in need of a 
similar charity. Lord Macaulay is at present a glory of 
the Whigs. If there had been an equal opening when he 
was a young man for distinction and profit as a Tory, for 
early retirement ^n literary pursuits with a competence, 
and for all the other things which he most desired, is it 
quite so certain that he would not have been of the other 
persuasion ? I have heard persons much more qualified 
than I am to decide on the characteristics of pure Lib- 
eralism energetically repudiate Macaulay's claim to be an 
apostle thereof. Yet I, for my part, have not the least 
idea of challenging his sincerity. It seems to me that he 
would have been at least wise if he had refrained, consid- 
ering the insuflScieney of his knov^'ledge, from challenging 
the sincerity of Dryden. 



104 • DRYDEN. [ch^. 

How insufficient the knowledge was the labours of sub- 
sequent investigators have sufficiently shown. Mr, Bell 
proved that the pension supposed to be conferred by 
James as a reward for Dryden's apostasy was simply a re- 
newal of the pension granted by Charles years before ; that 
it preceded instead of following the conversion ; and that 
the sole reason of its having to be renewed at all was 
technical merely. As for the argument about Dryden's 
being previously indifferent to religion, and having written 
indecent plays, the arguer has himself demolished his argu- 
ment in a famous passage about James's own morals, and 
the conduct of the non-resistance doctors of the Anglican 
Church. Burnet's exaggerated denunciations of Dryden 
as a " monster of impurity of all sorts," (fee, are sufficiently 
traceable to Shadwell's shameless libels and to the Char- 
acter of the Buzzard. It is true that the allegations of 
Malone and Scott, to the effect that Lady Elizabeth had 
been already converted, and Charles Dryden likewise, rest 
on a very slender foundation ; but these are matters which 
have very little to do with the question in any case. The 
real problem can be very easily stated. Given a man to 
the general rectitude of whose private conduct all quali- 
fied witnesses testify, while it is only qu^pstioned by un- 
scrupulous libellers — who gained, as can be proved, not 
one penny by his conversion, and though he subsequently 
lost heavily by it, maintained it unswervingly — who can 
be shown, from the most unbiassed of his previous writ- 
ings, to have been in exactly the state of mind which was 
likely to result in such a proceeding, and of whose insin- 
cerity there is no proof of the smallest value — what rea- 
son is there for suspecting him ? The literary greatness 
of the man has nothing to do with the question. The 
fact is that he has been convicted, or rather sentenced, on 



v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 105 

evidence which would not suflSce to convict Elkanah Settle 
or Samuel Pordage. 

In particular, we have a right to insist upon the absolute 
consistency of Dryden's subsequent conduct. Mr. Christie, 
who, admirably as for the most part he judges Dryden's 
literary work, was steeled against his personal character 
by the fact that Dryden attacked his idol, Shaftesbury, 
thinks that a recantation would have done him no good 
had he tried it. The opinion is, to say the least, hasty. 
Had Dryden proffered the oaths to William and Mary, as 
po(5l laureate and historiographer, it is very hard to see 
what power could have deprived him of his two hundred 
a year. The extra hundred of pension might have been 
forfeited, but the revenues of these places and of that in 
the Customs must have been safe, unless the new Govern- 
ment chose to incur what it was of all thino;s desirous to 
prevent, the charge of persecution and intolerance. When 
the Whigs were so desperately hard up for literary talent 
that Dorset, in presenting Shad well for the laureateship, 
had to pay him the very left-handed compliment of say- 
ing that, if he was not the best poet, he was at least the 
honestest — i. e., the most orthodoxly Whiggish — man, when 
hardly a single distinguished man of letters save Locke, 
who was nothing of a pamphleteer, was on their side, is 
it to be supposed for a moment that Dryden would not 
have been welcome ? The argument against him recalls a 
curious and honourable story which Johnson tells of Smith, 
the Bohemian author of Phcedra and Hippolytus. Addi- 
son, who, as all the world knows, was a friend of Smith's, 
and who was always ready to do his friends good turns, 
procured for Smith, from some Whig magnates, a commis- 
sion for a History of the Revolution. To the disgust of 

the mediator, Smith demurred. " What," he said, " am I 
11 



106 DRYDEN. [ciiaf. 

to do with the character of Lord Sunderland ?" Addison 
is said to have replied, in deep but illogical wrath, "When 
were you drunk last?" I feel extremely inclined to put 
Smith's query to the persons who maintain that it would 
have been impossible for Dryden to turn his coat at the 
Revolution. What are they going to do with the charac- 
ter of Lord Sunderland? In the age not merely of Sun- 
derland, but of Marlborough, of Godolphin, of Russell, of 
a hundred other treble-dyed traitors, it surely cannot be 
contended that the first living writer of English would 
have been rejected by those who had need of his services. 
Now we. know that, so far from making any overtures of 
submission, Dryden was stiff in his Jacobitism and in his 
faith. Nothing in his life is more celebrated than his per- 
sistent refusal to give way to Tonson's entreaties to dedi- 
cate the Virgil to William, and his whole post-Revolution 
works may be searched in vain for a single stroke intended 
to curry favour with the powers that were. If, as he puts 
it in a letter still extant, they would take him on his lit- 
erary merits, he would not refuse their offers ; but as to 
yielding an inch of his principles, he would not. And his 
works amply justify the brave words. It is surely hard 
measure to go out of one's way to upbraid with wanton 
or venal apostasy one to whose sincerity there is such 
complete testimony, both a 'priori and a posteriori^ as this. 
Except the Hind and the Panther, no work inspired by 
his new religious sentiments did Dryden much credit, or, 
it would appear, brought him much profit. James was not 
a particularly generous master, though it is probable that 
the laureate -historiographer -collector received his dues 
much more punctually under his orderly administration 
than in the days of his spendtiirift brother. The works 
upon which the court put Dryden were not very happily 



v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 101 

chosen, nor in all cases very happily executed. His defence 
of the reasons which had converted Anne Hyde is about 
the worst of his prose works, and was handled (in the 
rough controversial fashion of the day) very damagingly 
by Stillingfleet. A translation of a work of Varillas' on 
ecclesiastical history was announced but never published ; 
and, considering the worthlessness of Varillas as a histori- 
an, it is just as well. The Life of St. Francis Xavier, dedi- 
cated to the queen, was better worth doing, and was well 
done. It is curious that in this dedication occurs one of 
those confident anticipations of the birth of the young 
Pretender, which after the event were used by zealous 
Protestants as arguments for the spuriousness of the child. 
These and minor works show that Dryden, as indeed might 
be expected, was in favour at court, and was made use of 
by the economical and pious rulers of England. But of 
any particular benefit reaped by him from his conversion 
there is no hint whatever ; in some respects, indeed, it did 
him harm. His two youngest sons, who had followed their 
father's change of faith, were elected about this time to 
scholarships at the universities, but were prevented, appar- 
ently by their religion, from going into residence. 

The mere loss of education and prospects for his children 
was, however, a trifle to what Dryden had to undergo at 
the Revolution. It is probable that this event was almost 
as much a surprise to him as to James himself. But how- 
ever severe the blow might be, it was steadily borne. The 
period at which the oaths had to be taken to the new 
Government came, and Dryden did not take them. This 
vacated at once his literary posts and his place in the Cus- 
toms, if, as there seems every reason to believe, he held it 
up to the time. His position was now exceedingly serious. 
He was nearly sixty years of age. His patrimony was 



108 DRYDEK [chai^. 

but small, and such addition to it as he had received with 
Lady Elizabeth did not exceed a few scores of pounds an- 
nually. He had three sons grown to man's estate, and all 
the more difficult to provide for that their religion inca- 
pacitated them from almost every profitable pursuit in their 
native country. He himself had long, save in one trifling 
instance, broken his relation with the stage, the most lu- 
crative opening for literary work. He was a marked man, 
far more obnoxious personally to many of the ruling party 
than Milton had been thirty years before, when he thought 
it necessary to go into " abscondence." The very gains of 
the theatre were not what they had been, unless they were 
enhanced by assiduous visits to patrons and dedicatees, a 
degrading performance to which Dryden never would con- 
sent. Loss of fortune, of prospects, and of powerful friends 
was accompanied in Dryden's case by the most galling an- 
noyances to his self-love. His successor in the laureateship 
was none other than Shadwell, whom he had so bitterly 
satirized, whom he had justly enough declared able to do 
anything but write, and who was certain to exult over 
him with all the triumph of a coarse and vindictive nature. 
Dryden, however, came out of the trial admirably. He had, 
indeed, some staunch friends in both political parties — the 
Dorsets and the Leveson-Gowers being as true to him as 
the Rochesters and the Ormonds. Bat his main resource 
now, as all through his life, was his incomparable literary 
faculty, his splendid capacity for work, and his dogged op- 
position to the assaults of fortune. In the twelve years 
of life which remained to him he built up his fortune and 
maintained it anew, not merely by assiduous practice of 
those forms of literature in which he had already won 
renown, but by exercising yet again his marvellous talent 
for guessing the taste of the time, and striking out new 



v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 109 

lines to please it. Just as no one from Annus Mirahilis 
and Aurengzebe could have divined Absalom and Achito- 
phel and the Hind and the Panther^ so no one, except on 
the principle that all things were now possible to Dry den, 
could have divined from Absalom and Achitophel and the 
Hind and the Panther either Palamon and Arcite or the 
translation of Virgil. 

Some minor works of Dryden's not mentioned in the 
last chapter, nor falling under the heads to be noticed in 
subsequent chapters, may here deserve notice. Some time 
or other in the reign of James the Second, Dryden wrote 
to Etherege a poetical epistle, which is its author's only 
attempt in the easy octosyllabic verse, which Butler had 
just used with such brilliant success, and which Prior was 
in a more polished if less vigorous form to use with suc- 
cess almost equally brilliant a few years later. "Gentle 
George" Etherege deserved the compliments which Dry- 
den paid him more than once, and it is only to be wished 
that the poet's communications with him, whether in verse 
or prose, had been more frequent. Had they been so, we 
might have been able to solve what is now one of the 
most curious problems of English literary history. Though 
Etherege was a man of fashion, of literary importance, and 
of a distinguished position in diplomacy — he was English 
minister at Ratisbon, where Dryden addresses him — only 
the circumstances and not the date of his death are known. 
It is said that in seeing his friends downstairs he over- 
balanced himself and was taken up dead ; but when this 
happened no one seems to know.^ A line in the epistle 

^ In reply to a request of mine, Mr.W.Noel Sainsbury has brought 
to my notice letters of Etherege in the Record Office and in the Re- 
ports of the Historical MSS. Commission. In January, 1688-9, Ethe- 
rege wrote .to Lord Preston from Ratisbon. The first letter from his 



no DRYDEN. [chIp. 

seems to show that Etherege had been obliged to take to 
heavy drmking as a compliment to his German friends, 
and thus indirectly prophesies the circumstances of his 
death. But the author or Sir Fopling Flutter and She 
would if she could hardly deserved such a hugger-mugger 
end. 

To this time, too, belongs the first Ode on St. Cecilia's 
Day. It is not a great production, and cannot pretend 
comparison with the second and more famous piece com- 
posed on a later occasion. But it is curious how many 
lines and phrases it has contributed to the list of stock 
quotations — especially curious when it is remembered that 
the whole piece is only sixty-three lines long. "A heap 
of jarring atoms," "the diapason closing full in man," 
" the double, double, double beat of the thundering drum," 
and several other phrases, survive. The thing was set to 
music by an Italian composer named Draghi, and seems 
to have been popular. Besides these and other tasks. Dry- 
den began at this time a curious work or series of works, 
which was continued at intervals till his death, which was 
imitated afterwards by many others, and which in some 
sort was an ancestor of the modern literary masfazine or 
review. This was the Miscellany, the first volume of which 
appeared in the beginning of 1684, and the second in the 
beginning of 1685, though a considerable interval occur- 
red before a third volume was brought out. These vol- 
umes contained both old and new poems, mostly of the 
occasional kind, by Dryden himself, besides many of his 

successor is dated April, 1689. If, then, he died at Ratisbon, this 
brings the date between narrow limits. There is, however, a rival 
legend that he followed James into exile. Since this note was writ- 
ten more letters have, I hear, been found in the British Museum, and 
Mr. Gosse has the whole subject under treatment. 



v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. Ill 

translations. But they were by no means limited to his 
own productions. Many other authors, old and new, were 
admitted, and to the second vohime Charles Dryden, his 
eldest son, was a contributor. These two years (1684 and 
1685), it will be observed, were not merely those in which, 
owing to the non-payment of his appointments, his pe- 
cuniary straits must have been considerable, but they were 
also years in which there was a kind of lull between the 
rapid series of his great satirical works and the collection 
of verse and prose productions which owe their birth to 
his conversion. It is somewhat remarkable that Dry- 
den's abstinence from the stage during this time — which 
was broken only by the Duke df Guise and by the pro- 
duction of the rather unsuccessful opera, Albion and Alba- 
nius — seems to have been accompanied by a cessation also 
in his activity as a prologue writer. Both before and af- 
ter this period prologue writing was a regular source of 
income and employment to him. There is a famous story 
of Southern and Dryden which is often quoted, both for 
its intrinsic interest, and because the variety with which 
its circumstances are related is rather an instructive com- 
ment on the trustworthiness of such stories. Every one 
is supposed to know Pope's reference to the author of 
Oroonoko as — 

*' Tom, whom heaven sent down to raise 
The price of prologues and of plays." 

The story is that Southern in 1682 applied to Dryden 
for a prologue (which is extant), and was told that the 
tariff had gone up from two guineas to three — " Not out 
of any disrespect to you, young man, but the players have 
had my goods too cheap." The figures two and three are 
replaced in some versions by four and six, in others by 



112 DRYDEN. [cflAP.v. 

five and ten. This story gives the date of 1682, and it is 
remarkable that until 1690, when Dryden once more came 
on the stage himself with a new play, his prologues and 
epilogues are very few. Possibly the increased price was 
prohibitive, but it is more likely that the political strug- 
gles of the time put all but political verse out of fashion. 
These compositions had always been famous, or rather in- 
famous, for their licence of language, and the political ex- 
cesses of some of Dryden's few utterances of the kind at 
this time are not creditable to his memory. Uallam's 
phrase of "virulent ribaldry " is absurd as applied to Ab- 
salom and Achitophel, or to the Medal. It is only too 
well in place as applied to the stuff put in the mouth of 
the actress who spoke the epilogue to the DuJce of Guise. 
The truth is that if they be taken as a whole these prol- 
ogues and epilogues could be better spared by lovers of 
Dryden from his works than any other section thereof; 
and it is particularly to be regretted that Mr. Christie, in 
his excellent Globe edition of the poems, has admitted 
them, while excluding the always melodious, and some- 
times exquisitely poetical songs from the plays, which cer- 
tainly do not exceed the prologues in licence of language, 
while their literarv merit is incomparably greater. 




; 



CHAPTER VI. 

LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. ^ 

It might have seemed, at first siglit, that the Revohition 
would be a fatal blow to Dryden. Being unwilling to 
take the oaths to the new Government, he lost at once the 
places and the pensions which, irregularly as they had been 
paid, had made up, since he ceased to write constantly for 
the stage, by far the greater part of his income. He was 
nearly sixty years old, his private fortune was, if not al- 
together insignificant, quite insufficient for his wants, and 
he had three sons to maintain and set out in the world. 
But he faced the ruin of his fortunes, and, what must have 
been bitterer to him, the promotion of his enemies into his 
own place, with the steady courage and practical spirit of 
resource which were among his most creditable character- 
istics. Not all his friends deserted him, and from Dor- 
set in particular he received great and apparently constant 
assistance. The story that this generous patron actually 
compensated Dryden by an annuity equal in value to his 
former appointments seems to rest on insufficient founda- 
tion. The story that when Dryden and Tom Brown dined 
with Dorset the one found a hundred-pound note and the 
other a fifty-pound note under his cover, does not do much 
credit to Dorset's powers of literary arithmetic, nor, even 
allowing for the simpler manners of the time, to his deli- 
6 



ll4 DRYDEN. [chap. 

ciicy of feeling. But Dryden's own words are explicit on 
the point of his having received assistance from this old 
friend, and it is said that in certain letfers preserved at 
Knole, and not yet given to the world, there are still more 
definite acknowledgments. Dryden, however, was never 
disposed to depend on patrons, even though, like Corneille, 
he did not think it necessary to refuse their gifts when 
they presented themselves. Theatrical gains had, it has 
been ^aid, decreased, unless dramatists took pains to in- 
crease them by dedication or by the growing practice of 
placing subscription copies among wealthy friends. Still, 
a hundred pounds could be depended upon from a good 
third night and from the bookseller's fee for the book, 
and a hundred pounds was a matter of considerable im- 
portance to Dryden just now. For full seven years he 
had all but abandoned dramatic composition. His con- 
tributions to Lee's Duke of Guise, which probably brought 
him no money, and certainly brought him a troublesome 
controversy, and the opera of Albion and Alhanius had 
been his only attempts on the stage since the Spcmish 
Friar. The JDuke of Guise, though Dryden's part in it is 
of no little merit, hardly needs notice here, and Albion and 
Albanius was a failure. It was rather a masque than an 
opera, and depended, though there is some good verse in 
it, rather on elaborate and spiteful gibbeting of the ene- 
mies of the court than on poetical or dramatic merits. 
But Dryden's dramatic reputation was by no means im- 
paired. The first play ordered to be performed by Queen 
Mary was the Spanish Friar, and this Protestant drama 
proved a most unfortunate one for her Majesty ; for the 
audience at that time were extraordinarily quick to seize 
any kind of political allusion, and, as it happcn(>d, there 
were in the Spanish Friar many allusions of an accidt^i- 



VI.] LATER DRAMAS A^D PROSE WORKS. 115 

tal biit uninistalvable kind to ungrateful cliildren, banished 
monarchs, and so forth. The eyes of the whole audience 
were fixed on Mary, and she probably repented of her choice. 
But Dryden did not long depend on revivals of his old 
plays. The second year of the new regime saw the pro- 
duction of Don Sebastian^ a tragi-comedy, one scene of 
which, that between Sebastian and Dorax, is famous in 
literature, and which as a whole is often ranked above all 
Dryden's other dramas, though for my own par^ I prefer 
All for Love. The play, though at first received with a 
certain lukewarmness, which may have been due to vari- 
ous causes, soon became very popular. It was dedicated 
to Lord Leicester, Algernon Sidney's eldest brother, a ver\' 
old man, who was probably almost alone among liis con- 
temporaries (with the exception of Dryden himself) in be- 
ing an ardent admirer of Chaucer. In the preface to the 
Fables the poet tells us that he had postponed his transla- 
tion of the elder bard out of deference to Lord Leicester's 
strongly expressed opinion that the text should be left 
alone. In the same year was produced a play less origi- 
nal, but perhaps almost better, and certainly more popular. 
This was Amphitryon^ which some critics have treated 
most mistakenly as a mere translation of Moliere. The 
truth is, that the three plays of Plautus, MoUere, and Dry- 
den are remarkable examples of the power which great 
writers have of treading in each other's steps without ser- 
vile imitation. In a certain dry humour Dryden's play 
is inferior to Plautus, but, as compared with Moliere, it 
has two features which are decided improvements — the 
introduction of the character of Judge Gripus and the 
separation of the part of the Soubrette into two. As Don 
Sebastian had been dedicated to Lord Leicester, an old 
Cromwellian, so Amphitryon was dedicated to Sir William 



116 DRYDEN. [chIp. 

Leveson Gower, a prominent Williamite. Neither dedica- 
tion contains the least truckling to the powers that were, 
but Dry den seems to have taken a pleasure in showing 
that men of both parties were sensible of his merit and of 
the hardship of his position. Besides these two plays an 
alteration of The Prophetess was produced in 1690, in 
which Dryden is said to have assisted Betterton. In 1691 
appeared King Arthur, a masque-opera on the plan of Al- 
bion and Albanius. Unlike the latter, it has no political 
meaning; indeed, Dryden confesses to having made con- 
siderable alterations in it, in order to make it non-political. 
The former piece had been set by a Frenchman, Grabut, 
and the music had been little thought of. Purcell under- 
took the music for King Arthur with much better success. 
Allowing for a certain absurdity which always besets the 
musical drama, and which is particularly apparent in that 
of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. King 
Arthur is a very good piece ; the character of Emmeline 
is attractive, the supernatural part is managed with a skill 
which would have been almost proof against the wits of 
the Rehearsal, and many of the lyrics are excellent. Dry- 
den was less fortunate with his two remaining dramas. 
In writing the first, he showed himself, for so old a crafts- 
man and courtier, very unskilful in the choice of a sub- 
ject. Cleomenes, the banished King of Sparta, could not 
but awaken the susceptibilities of zealous revolution cen- 
sors. After some difficulties, in which Laurence Hyde 
once more did Dryden a good turn, the piece was licensed, 
but it was not very successful. It contains some fine pas- 
sages, but the most remarkable thing about it is that there 
is a considerable relapse into rhyme, which Dryden had 
abandoned for many years. It contains, also, on^:?of the 
last, not the least beautiful, and fortunately almost the \ 



VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. IIY 

most quotable of the exquisite lyrics which, while they 
prove, perhaps, more fully than anything else, Dryden's al- 
most unrivalled command of versification, disprove at the 
same time his alleged incapacity to express true feeling. 
Here it is : 

*' No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour, 
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her ; 
My ravished eyes behold such charms about her, 
I can die with her, but not live without her ; 
One tender sigh of hers to see me languish, 
• Will more than pay the price of my past anguish : 
Beware, cruel fair, how you smile on me, 
'Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me. 

I 
"Love has in store for me one happy minute, 
And she will end my pain who did begin it ; 
• Then no day void of bliss, of pleasure, leaving. 
Ages shall slide away without perceiving : 
Cupid shall guard the door, the more to please us, 
And keep out time and death, when they would seize us : 
Time and death shall depart, and say, in flying. 
Love has found out a way to live by dying." 

Last of all the long list came Love Triumphant, a tragi- 
comedy, in 1694, which failed completely; why, it is not 
very easy to say. It is probable that these four plays and 
the opera did not by any means requite Dry den for his 
trouble in' writing them. The average literary worth of 
them is, however, superior to that of his earlier dramas. 
The remarkable thing, indeed, about this portion of his 
work is not that it is not better, but that it is so good. 
He can scarcely be said to have had la.tete dramatique, 
and yet in the Conquest of Granada, in Marriage a la 
Mode, in Aurengzehe, in All for Love, in the Spanish 
Frtatj in Don Sebastian, and in Amphitryon he produced 



118 DRYDEN. [ch^. 

plays wliicli are certainly worthy of no little admiration. 
For the rest, save in isolated scenes and characters, little 
can be said, and even those just specified have to be praised 
vi'ith not a little allowance. 

Nevertheless, great as are the drawbacks of these plays, 
their position in the history of English dramatic literature 
is still a high and remarkable one. It was Dry den who, 
if he for the moment headed the desertion of the purely 
English style of drama, authoritatively and finally ordered 
and initiated the return to a saner tradition. Even in 
his period of aberration he produced on his faulty plan 
such work as few other men have produced on the best 
plans yet elaborated. The reader who, ignorant of the 
English heroic play, goes to Dryden for information about 
it, may be surprised and shocked at its inferiority to the 
drama of the great masters. But he who goes to it know- 
ing the contemporary work of Davenant and Boyle, of 
Howard and Settle, will rather wonder at the unmatched 
literary faculty which from such data could evolve such 
a result. The one play in which he gave himself the 
reins remains, as far as it appears to me, the only play, 
with the exception of Venice Preserved, which was written 
so as to be thoroughly worth reading now for 150, 1 had 
almost said for 200 years. The Mourning Bride and the 
Fair Penitent are worthless by the side of it, and to 
them may be added at one sweep every tragedy written 
during the whole eighteenth century. Since the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth we have indeed improved the poet- 
ical standard of this most difficult, not to say hopeless, form 
of composition ; but at the same time we have in general 
lowered the dramatic standard. Half the best plays writ- 
ten since the year 1800 have been avowedly written with 
hardly a thought of being acted ; I should be sorry to say 



VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 119 

how many of the otiier half have either failed to be acted 
at all, or, having been acted, have proved dead failures. 
Now Dryden did so far manage to conciliate the gifts of 
the play-wright and the poet, that he produced work which 
was good poetry and good acting material. It is idle to 
dispute the deserts of his success, the fact remains. 

Most, however, of his numerous hostile critics would 
confess and avoid the tragedies, and would concentrate 
their attention on the comedies. It is impossible to help, 
in part, imitating and transferring their tactics. No apol- 
ogy "f or the offensive characteristics of these productions 
is possible, and, if it were possible, I for one have no care 
to attempt it. The coarseness of Dryden's plays is unpar- 
donable. It does not come under any of the numerous 
categories of excuse which can be devised for other offend- 
ers in the same kind. It is deliberate, it is unnecessary, 
it is a positive defect in art. When the culprit, in his oth- 
erwise dignified and not unsuccessful confiteor to Collier, 
endeavours to shield himself by the example of the elder 
dramatists, the shiel(J is seen at once, and, w^hat is more, 
we know that he must have seen it himself to be a mere 
shield of paper. - But in truth the heaviest punishment 
that Dryden could possibly have suffered, the punishment 
which Diderot has indicated as inevitably imminent on 
this particular offence, has come upon him. The fouler 
parts of his work have simply ceased to be read, and his 
most thorough defenders can only read them for the pur- 
pose of appreciation and defence at the price of being 
queasy and qualmish. He has exposed his legs to the ar- 
rows of any criticaster who chooses to aim at him, and the 
criticasters have not failed to jump at the chance of so no- 
ble a quarry. Yet I, for my part, shall still maintain that 
the merits of Dryden's comedies are by no means incon- 



120 DRYDEN. [citap. 

siderable ; indeed that, when Shakspeare, and Jonson, and 
Fletcher, and Etherege, and Wycherley, and Congreve, and 
Vanbrugh, and Sheridan have been put aside, he has few 
superiors. The unfailing thoroughness with which he did 
every description of literary work has accompanied him 
even here, where he worked, according to his own confes- 
sion, against the grain, and where he was less gifted by 
nature than scores of other facile workers who could be 
named. The one situation which he could manage has 
been already indicated, and it is surely not a thing to be 
wholly neglected that his handlings of this situation un- 
doubtedly preceded and probably suggested the crowning 
triumph of English comedy — the sublime apotheosis of 
the coquette in Millamant. To produce that triumph Dry- 
den himself was indeed unable. But from sheer literary 
skill (the dominant faculty in him) he produced in Dora- 
lice, and in Melantha, and in Florimel, something not 
wholly unlike it. So, too, in the central figure of the 
Spanish Friar he achieved in the same way, by sheer lit- 
erary faculty and by the skilful manipulation of his pred- 
ecessors, -something like an independent and an original 
creation. The one disqualification under which Dryden 
laboured, the disqualification to create a. character, would 
have been in any lesser man a hopeless bar even to the 
most moderate dramatic success. But the superhuman 
degree in which he possessed the other and strictly litera- 
ry gift of adoption and arrangement almost supplied the 
place of what v/as wanting, and almost made him the 
equal of the more facile makers. So close was his study, 
so untiring his experiments, so sure his command, by dint 
of practice, of language, and metre, and situation, that he 
could, like the magicians of Egypt, make serpents almost 
like, or quite like those of the true dramatic Moses. 



VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 121 

Shakspeare's serpents have eaten his up in time, and the 
retribution is just, but the credit of the original feat is 
hardly the less for that. In short, all, or almost all. Dry- 
den's dramatic work is a tour de force^ but then it is such 
a tour deforce as the world has hardly elsewhere seen. He 
was " bade to toil on to make them sport," and he obeyed 
the bidding with perhaps less reluctance than he should 
have shown. But he managed, as genius always does 
manage, to turn the hack-work into a possession for ever 
here and there. Unluckily it was only here and there, 
an^ no more can be claimed for it by any rational critic. 

The subject of Dryden's prose work is intimately con- 
nected with that of his dramatic performances. Had it 
not been for the interest he felt in matters dramatic, he 
might never have ventured into anything longer than a 
preface ; and his prefaces would certainly have lacked the 
remarkable interest in the history of style and in the his- 
tory of criticism which they now possess. At the time 
when he first began to write, the accepted prose style of 
English was in much greater need of reform and reinforce- 
ment than the accepted poetical style ; or, to speak more 
properly, there was no accepted prose style at all. Great 
masters — Bacon, Hooker, Clarendon, Milton, Taylor, 
Hobbes, Bunyan, and some others — may be quoted from 
the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century; but their 
excellences, like the excellences of the writers of French 
prose somewhat earlier, were almost wholly individual, and 
provided in no way a model whereby the average writer 
might form himself for average purposes. Now, prose is 
above all things the instrument of the average purpose. 
Poetry is more or less intolerable if it be not intrinsical- 
ly and peculiarly good ; prose is the necessary vehicle of 
thought. Up to Dryden's time no such generally avml' 
I 6* 



122 DRYDEN. [chap. 

able vehicle had been attempted or achieved by any one. 
Clarendon had shown how genius can make the best of 
the worst style, which from any general point of view his 
must probably be pronounced to be. In his hands it is 
alternately delightful or tolerable; in the hands of any- 
body else it would be simply frightful. His parentheses, 
his asides, his endless involutions of phrase and thought, 
save themselves as if by miracle, and certainly could not be 
trusted so to save themselves in any less favoured hands. 
Bacon and Hooker, the former in an ornate, the latter in a 
simple style, reproduce classical constructions and forms in 
English. Taylor and Milton write poetry in prose. Quaint- 
ness and picturesque matter justify, and more than justify. 
Fuller and Browne. Bunyan puts the vernacular into print 
with a sublime assurance and success. Hobbes, casting off 
all ornament and all pretence of ornament, clothes his naked 
strength in the simplest garment of words competent to 
cover its nakedness. But nor^ of these had elaborated, or 
aimed at elaborating, a style suited for every-day use — for 
the essayist and the pamphleteer, the preacher and the lay 
orator, the historian and the critic. This was what Dry- 
den did with little assistance from any forerunner, if it were 
not Tillotson, to whom, as we know from Congreve, he ac- 
knowledo-ed his indebtedness. But Tillotson was not a 
much older man than Dryden himself, and at least when 
the latter began to write prose, his work was neither bulky 
nor particularly famous. Nor in reading Tillotson, though 
it is clear that he and Dryden were in some sort working 
on the same lines, is it possible to trace much indebtedness 
on the part of the poet. The sometime archbishop's ser- 
mons are excellent in their combination of simplicity with 
a certain grace, but they are much less remarkable than 
Dryden's own work for the union of the two. The great 



Ti.J LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 123 

fault of the elders had been, first, the inordinate length of 
their sentences ; secondly — and this was rather a cause of 
the first fault than an additional error — their indulgence 
in parenthetic quotations, borrowed ar-guments, and other 
strengtheners of the position of the man who has to rely 
on authority ; thirdly, the danger to which they were al- 
ways exposed, of slipping into clumsy classicisms on one 
side, or inelegant vernacular on the other. Dryden avoid- 
ed all these faults, though his avoidance was not a matter 
of a day or a year, nor was it, as far as can be made out, 
alfogether an avoidance of malice prepense. Accident fa- 
voured him in exactly the reverse way to that in which it 
had favoured the reformer of French prose half a century 
or so before. Balzac had nothing to say, and therefore was 
extremely careful and exquisite in his manner of saying it. 
Dryden had a great deal to say, and said it in the plaip, 
straightforward fashion which was of all things most likely 
to be useful for the formation of a workman-like prose 
style in English. 

The influences of the post-Restoration period which, by 
their working, produced the splendid variety and efliiciency 
of prose in the eighteenth century — the century, 'par excel- 
lence^ of prose in English — were naturally numerous ; but 
there were four which had an influence far surpassing that 
of the rest. These four were the influences of the pul- 
pit, of political discussion, of miscellaneous writing — -partly 
fictitious, partly discursive — and lastly, of literary criticism. 
In this last Dryden himself was the grgat authority of the 
period, and for many years it was in this form tl^at he at 
once exercised himself and educated his age in the matter 
of prose writing. Accident and the circumstances of the 
time helped to give him a considerable audience, and an 
influence of great width, the critical spirit being extensive- 



124 DRYDEN. [ckap. 

\y diffused at the time. This critical spirit was to a great 
extent a reflection of that which, beginning with Malherbe, 
and continuing with the institution and regulation of the 
Academy, had for some time been remarkable in France. 
Not long after the Restoration one of the subtlest and 
most accomplished of all French critics took up his resi- 
dence in England, and gave further impulse to the fashion 
which Charles himself and many other cavaliers had al- 
ready picked up. Saint Evremond lived in England for 
some forty years, and during the greater part of that time 
was an oracle of the younger men of wit and pleasure 
about London. Now Saint Evremond was a remarkable 
instance of that rare animal, the born critic ; even nowa- 
days his critical dicta are worthy of all attention. He had 
a kind of critical intuition, which is to be paralleled only 
by the historical and scientific intuition which some of the 
greatest historians and men of science have had. With 
national and characteristic indolence he never gave Himself 
the trouble to learn English properly, and it is doubtful 
whether he could have read a single English play. Yet 
his critical remarks on some English poets, not borrowed 
from his friends, but constructed from their remarks, as a 
clever counsel would construct a pleading out of the infor- 
mation furnished him, are extraordinarily acute and accu- 
rate. The relish for literary discussion which Saint Evre- 
mond shows was no peculiarity of his, though he had it in 
super-eminent measure. It was fashionable in France, and 
he helped to make it fashionable in England. 

I have seen this style of criticism dismissed contempt- 
uously as "trifling;" but this is only an instance of the 
strange power of reaction. Because for many years the 
p^an of criticising by rule and line was almost exclusively 
pursued, and, as happens in the case of almost all exclusive 



vl] later dramas and prose works. 125 

pursuits, was followed too far, it seems to some people 
now^adays, that criticism ought to be confined to the ex^ 
pression, in more or less elegant language, of the feelings 
of admiration or dislike which the subject criticised may 
excite in the critic's mind. The critic ought to give this 
impression, but he ought not to leave the other task unat- 
tempted, and the result of leaving it unatterapted is to be 
found in the loose and haphazard judgments which now 
too often compose what is called criticism. The criticism 
of the Gallic School, which Dryden and Saint Evremond 
helped so much to naturalize in England, was at least not 
afraid of giving a reason for the faith that was,in it. The 
critics strove to examine the abstract value of this or that 
literary form, the propriety of this or that mode of expres- 
sion, the limits to be imposed on the choice and disposition 
of this or that subject. No doubt this often resulted in 
looking merely at the stopwatch, as Sterne's famous phrase 
has it. But it often resulted in something better, and it 
at least produced something like reasonable uniformity of 
judgment. 

Dryden's criticisms took, as a rule, the form of prefaces 
to his plays, and the reading of the play ensured, to some 
considerable extent, the reading of the preface. Probably 
the pattern may be found in Corneille's Examens. Nor 
must it be forgotten that the questions attacked iH these 
disquisitions were of real interest at the time to a large 
number of persons; to a very much larger number rela- 
tively, perhaps even to a much larger number absolutely, 
than would now be the case. The first instance of a con- 
siderable piece of prose written by Dryden was not, indeed, 
a preface, though it was of the nature of one. The Essay 
on Dramatic Poesy was written, according to its own show- 
ing, in the summer of 1665, and published two or three 



126 DRYDEN. [chap. 

years later. It takes the form of a dialogue between in- 
terlocutors, who are sufficiently identified with Dorset, Sed- 
ley, Sir Robert Howard, and Dryden himself. The argu- 
ment turns on various questions of comparison between 
classical French and English dramas, and especially between 
English dramas of the old and of the newer type, the lat- 
ter of which Dryden defends. It is noticeable, however, 
that this very essay contained one of the best worded and 
best thought-out of the author's many panegyrics upon 
Shakspeare. Viewed simply from the point of view of style 
this performance exhibits Dryden as already a considerable 
master of prose, though, so far as we know, he had had no 
practice in it beyond a few Prefaces and Dedications, if 
we except the unacknowledged hackwork which he is some- 
times said to have performed for the bookseller Herring- 
man. There is still something of the older, lengthy sen- 
tence, and of the tendency to elongate it by joint on joint 
as fresh thoughts recur to the writer. But these elonga- 
tions rarely sacrifice clearness, and there is an almost total 
absence, on the one hand, of the cumbrous classical con- 
structions of the elders ; on the other, of the quaint collo- 
quialisms which generally make their appearance when this 
more ambitious style is discarded. The Eesay was quickly 
followed by a kind of reply from Sir Robert Howard, and 
Dryden made a somewhat sharp rejoinder to his brother- 
in-law in the defence of the Essay which he prefixed to his 
play of The Indian Emperor. He was evidently very an- 
gry with Sir Robert, who had, indeed, somewhat justified 
Shadwell's caricature of him as "Sir Positive At-All ;" and 
this anger is not without effects on the style of the de- 
fence. Its sentences are sharper, shorter, more briskly and 
flippantly moulded than those of the Essay. Indeed, about 
this time — the time of his greatest prosperity — Dryden 



VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 127 

seems to have passed, somewhat late in life, througli a pe- 
riod of flippancy. He was for a few years decidedly pros- 
perous, and his familiarity with men of rank and position 
seems a little to have turned his head. It was at this time, 
and at this time onlj^, that he spoke disrespectfully of his 
great predecessors, and insinuated, in a manner which, I 
fear, must be called snobbish, that his own familiarity with 
such models of taste and deportment as Rochester put him 
in a very superior position for the drawing of character 
to such humble and home-keeping folks as the old drama- 
tists. These prefaces and dedications, however, even where 
their matter is scarcely satisfactory, show an ever-growing 
command of prose style, and very soon the resipiscence of 
Dryden's judgment, and the result of his recently renewed 
study of the older writers. The Preface to All for Love, 
though short, and more familiar in style than the earlier 
work, is of excellent quality ; and the same may be said 
of those to Troilus and Cressida and the Spanish Friar, 
the latter of which is especially characteristic, and contains 
some strikino; remarks on the old dramatists. The 2:reat 
poetical works of the period between 1680 and 1687 are 
also attended by prose introductions, and some of these 
are exceedingly well done. The Epistle to the Whigs, 
which forms the preface to the Medal, is a piece of po- 
litical writing such as there had been hitherto but very 
little in English, and it was admirably followed up by 
the Vindication of the Duke of Guise. On the other 
hand, the preface to Religio Laici^ though partly also 
polemical, is a model of what may be called the exposi- 
iory style. Dryden obtained no great credit for his con- 
troversy with Stillingfleet, his Life of St. Francis Xavier, 
or his History of the League, all of which were directly or 
indirectly controversig,l, and concerned with the political 



128 DRYDEN. [chap. 

events of the tjrae. As his lengthiest prose works, how- 
ever, they can hardly be passed over without notice. 

The Revolution, in throwing Dryden back upon purely 
literary pursuits, did him no more harm in the way of 
prose than of poetical composition. Not a few of his 
Translations have prose prefaces of peculiar excellence pre- 
fixed. The sketch of Satire which forms the preface to 
the Juvenal is one of the best of its author's performances. 
The uEneid is introduced by an admirable dedication to 
Mulgrave ; but the essay on the Georgics, though it is not, 
indeed, Dryden's own, is almost more interesting in this 
connexion than if it were ; for this essay came from the 
pen of no less a person than Addison, then a young man 
of five-and-twenty, and it enables us to judge of the in- 
debtedness of the Queen Anne men to Dryden, in prose as 
well as in poetry. It would be a keen critic who, knowing 
Addison only from the Spectator, could detect his hand in 
this performance. But it does not require much keenness 
in any one who knows Dryden's prose and Addison's, to 
trace the link of connexion which this piece affords. It 
lies much nearer to the former than the latter, and it 
shows clearly how the writer must have studied those 
"prefaces of Dryden" which Swift chose to sneer at. As 
in poetry, however, so in prose, Dryden's best, or almost 
his best work, was his last. The dedication of the Fables 
to the Duke of Ormond is the last and the most splendid 
of his many pieces of polished flattery. The preface which 
follows it is the last and one of the best examples of his 
literary criticism. 

It has been justly observed of Dryden's prose style that 
it is, for the style of so distinguished a writer, singularly 
destitute of mannerism. If we father any particular piece 
upon him without knowing it to be, his, it is not, as in the 



VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 129 

case of most writers, because of some obvious trick of ar- 
rangement or phraseology. The truth is, or at least the 
probability, that Dryden had no thought of inventing or 
practising a definite prose style, though he had more than 
once a very definite intention in his practice of matters 
poetical. Poetry was with him, as, indeed, it should be, 
an end in itself ; prose, as perhaps it should also be for 
the niost part, only a means to an end. He wanted, from 
time to time, to express his ideas on certain points that in- 
terested him ; to answer accusations which he thought un- 
jusf; to propitiate powerful patrons; sometimes, perhaps, 
merely to discharge commissions with which he had been 
intrusted. He found no good instrument ready to his hand 
for these purposes, and so, with that union of the practical 
and literary spirit which distinguished him so strongly, he 
set to work to make one. But he had no special predi- 
lection for the instrument, except in so far as it served its 
turn, and he had, therefore, no object in preserving any 
special peculiarities in it except for the same reason. His 
poetical and dramatic practice, and the studies which that 
practice implied, provided him with an ample vocabulary, 
a strong, terse method of expression, and a dislike to ar- 
chaism, vulgarity, or want of clearness. He therefore let 
his words arrange themselves pretty much as they would, 
and probably saw no object in such devices as the balanc- 
ing of one part of a sentence by another, which attraited 
so many of his* successors. The long sentence, with its 
involved clauses, was contrary to his habit of thought, and 
would have interfered with his chief objects — clearness and 
precision. Therefore he, in the main, discarded it ; yet if 
at any time a long and somewhat complicated sentence 
seemed to him to be appropriate, he did not hesitate to 
write one. Slipshod diction and cant vulgarities revolted 



130 DRYDEN. [chap. 

his notions of correctness and elegance, and therefore he 
seldom uses them ; yet there ar5 not very .many writers in 
whom colloquialisms occasionally occur with happier effect. 
If a fault is to be found with his style, it probably lies in 
a certain abuse of figures and of quotation, for both of 
which his strong tincture of the characteristics of the first 
half of .the century may be responsible, while the former, 
at least, is natural to a poet. Yet, on the whole, his style, 
if compared either with Hooker and Clarendon, Bacon and 
Milton, on the one hand, or with Addison, and still more 
the later eighteenth century writers, on the other, is a dis- 
tinctly plain and homely style. It is not so vernacular as 
Bunyan or Defoe, and not quite so perfect in simplicity as 
Swift. Yet with the work of these three writers it stands 
at the head of the plainer English prose styles, possessing 
at the same time a capacity of magnificence to which the 
others cannot pretend. As there is no original narrative 
of any length from Dryden's hand in prose, it is difficult 
to say whether he could have discharged satisfactorily this 
part of the prose-writer's functions. The Life of Xavier 
is good, but not of the best. For almost any other func- 
tion, however, the style seems to be well adapted. 

Now this, it must be remembered, was the great want 
of the day in matter of prose style — a style, namely, that 
should be generally flexible and capable of adaptation, not 
merely to the purposes of the erudite and ambitious, but 
to any purpose for which it might be .required, and in 
which the vernacular and the literary elements should be , 
properly blended and adjusted. It is scarcely too much 
to say that if, as some critics have inclined to think, the 
influence of Dryden tended to narrow the sphere and 
cramp the efforts of English poetry, it tended equally to 
enlarge the sphere and develope the energies of English 



VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 131 

prose. It has often been noticed that poets, when they 
have any faculty for prose writing, are among the best of 
prose writers, and of no one is this more true than it is of 
Dry den. 

Set prose passages of laboured excellence are not very 
common with Dryden. But the two following, the first 
being the famous character of Shakspeare from the Essay 
on Dramatic Poesy, the second an extract from the preface 
to the Fables, will give some idea of his style at periods 
separated by more than thirty years. The one was his 
first work of finished prose, the other his last : 

" As Neander was beginning to examine ' The Silent Woman,' 
Eugenius, earnestly regarding him ; I beseech 5'ou, Neander, said he, 
gratify the company, and me in particular, so far, as before you speak 
of the play, to give us a character of the author ; and tell us frankly 
your opinion, whether you do not think all writers, both French and 
English, ought to give place to him. I fear, replied Neander, that in 
obeying your commands I shall draw some envy on myself. Besides, 
in performing them, it will be first necessary to speak somewhat of 
Shakspeare and Eletcher, his rivals in poesy ; and one of them, in my 
opinion, at least his equal, perhaps his superior. To begin then with 
Shakspeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps an- 
cient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the 
images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not la- 
boriously, but luckily ; when he describes anything, you more than 
see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learn- 
ing, give him the greater commendation : he was naturally learned ; 
he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature ; he looked in- 
wards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike ; 
were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest 
of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid — his comick wit degen- 
erating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is 
always great when some great occasion is presented to him ; no man 
can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise 
himself as high above the rest of poets, * 

' Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.' 



132 DRYDEN. q [chap. 

The consideration of this made Mr. Hales ol jJton say, that there vas 
no subject of which any poet ever writ but he would produce it mucu 
better done in Shakspeare ; and however others are now generally 
preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which had con- 
temporaries with him, Fletcher and Jonson, never equalled them to 
him in their esteem ; and in the last king's court, when Ben's repu- 
tation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater 
part of the courtiers, set our Shakspeare far above him." 



" As for the religion of our poet,^ he seems to have some little bias 
towards the opinions of WicklifPe, after John of Gaunt, his patron ; 
somewhat of which appears in the ' Tale of Pierce Plowman ;' yet I 
cannot blame him for inveighing so sharply against the vices of the 
clergy in his age : their pride, their ambition, their pomp, their ava- 
rice, their worldly interest, deserved the lashes which he gave them, 
both in that and in most of his Canterbury Tales. Neither has his 
contemporary, Boccace, spared them. Yet both those poets lived in 
much esteem with good and holy men in orders ; for the scandal 
which is given by particular priests reflects not on the sacred func- 
tion. Chaucer's Monk, his Canon, and his Friar took not from the 
character of his Good Parson. A satirical poet is the check of the 
laymen on bad priests. We are only to take care that we involve 
not the innocent with the guilty in the same condemnation. The 
good cannot be too much honoured, nor the bad too coarsely used ; 
for the corruption of the best becomes the worst. When a clergy- 
man is whipped, his gown is first taken off, by which the dignity of 
his order is secured. If he be wrongfully accused, he has his action 
of slander: and it is at the poet's peril if he transgress the law. 
But they will tell us that all kind of satire, though never so well de- 
served by particular priests, yet brings the whole order into con- 
tempt. Is then the peerage of England anything dishonoured when 
a peer suffers for his treason ? If he be libelled, or any way de- 
famed, he has his scandalum magnatum to punish the offender. 
They who use this kind of argument seem to be conscious to them- 
selves of somewhat which has deserved the poet's lash, and are less 

> Chaucer. 



vr.]'*^*''"-! LATER I 4MAS AND PROSE WORKS. 133 

oh{J6rn^' for Weht' pfttt)lick capacity than for their private ; at least, 
there iU pride at the bottom of their reasoning. If the faults of men 
in orders are only to be judged among themselves, they are all in 
some sort parties ; for, since they say the honour of their order is 
concerned in every member of it, how can we be sure that they will 
be impartial judges ? How far I may be allowed to speak my opin- 
ion in this case, I know not ; but I am sure a dispute of this nature 
caused mischief in abundance betwixt a King of England and an 
Archbishop of Canterbury , one standing up for the laws of his land, 
and the other for the honour (as he called it) of God's church; 
which ended in the murder of the Prelate, and in the whipping of his 
Majesty from post to pillar for his penance. The learned and in- 
genious Dr. Drake has saved me the labour of enquiring into the 
esteem and reverence which the priests have had of old ; and I would 
rather extend than diminish any part of it ; yet I must needs say 
that, when a priest provokes me without any occasion given him, I 
have no reason, unless it be the charity of a Christian, to forgive 
him : prior Icesit is justification sufficient in the civil law. If I an- 
swer him in his own language, self-defence, I am sure, must be allow- 
ed me ; and if I carry it farther, even to a sharp recrimination, some- 
what may be indulged to human frailty. Yet my resentment has not 
wrought so far, but that I have followed Chaucer in his character of 
a holy man, and have enlarged on that subject with some pleasure, 
reserving to myself the right, if I shall think fit hereafter, to describe 
another sort of priests, such as are more easily to be found than the 
Good Parson ; such as have given the last blow to Christianity in 
this age, by a practice so contrary to their doctrine. But this will 
keep cold till another time. In the mean while I take up Chaucer 
where I left him." 

These must suffice for examples of the matter as well 
as of the manner of the literary criticism which forms 
the chief and certainly the most valuable part of Dryden's 
prose works. The great value of that criticism consists 
in its extremely appreciative character, and in its constant 
connexion with the poet's own constructive work. There 
is much in it which might seem to expose Dryden to the 
charge of inconsistency. But the truth is, that his literary 



134 DRYDEN. ,,| gg^AJ C^HAJ^Tt 

opinions were in a perpetual state of progress, ATjdj.tb^;^}^ 
fore of apparent flux. Sometimes he wrote with defective 
knowledge, sometimes, though not often, without think- 
ing the subject out, sometimes (and this very often) with a 
;>:.ertain one-sidedness of view having reference rather to the 
bearing of the point on experiments he was then trying or 
about to try, than to any more abstract considerations. He 
never aimed at paradox for its own sake, but he never 
shrank from it ; and, on the whole, his criticisms, though 
perhaps nowadays they appeal rather to the expert and 
the student than to the general reader, are at least as in- 
teresting for their matter as for their form. The impor- 
tance of the study of that form in the cultivation of a ro- 
bust English style has never been denied. 



9 .Uvjy:j 'jit^l' •. s;f>xm 



CHAPTER VII. 

% 

PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 

7t i^in most cases a decidedly difficult problem to settle 
the exact influence which any Vriter's life and circum- 
stances have upon his literary performances and career. 
Although there are probably few natures so absolutely 
self-sufficing and so imperial in their individuality that 
they take no imprint from the form and pressure of the 
time, the exact force which that pressure exercises is near- 
ly always very hard to calculate. In the case of Dry den, 
however, the difficulty is fortunately minimized. There 
was never, it may safely be said, so great a writer who was 
so thoroughly occasional in the character of his greatness. 
The one thing which to all appearance he could not do, 
was to originate a theme. His second best play, accord- 
ing to the general judgment, his best as I venture to 
think, is built, with an audacity to which only great genius 
or great folly could lead, on the lines of Shakspeare. His 
longest and most ambitious poem follows, with a surpris- 
ing, faithfulness, the lines of Chaucer. His most effective 
piece of tragic description is a versified paraphrase — the 
most magnificent paraphrase, perhaps, ever written — of 
the prose of Boccaccio. Even in his splendid satires he is 
rarely successful, unless he has what is called in modern 
literaryjiiang a very definite "peg" gi^^en hjm to hang his 



136 DRYDEN. [chap. 

verse upon. Absalom, and Achitophel is litll^ more than 
a loosely connected string of cKaracters, each owing no 
doubt something, and what is more, a great deal, to the 
poet, but originally given to, and not invented by him. 
No fashion of poetry can be farther aloof from Dryden's 
than that which, as in the case of Shelley, spins great 
poems purely out of its own brain. His strong and pow- 
erful mind could grind the corn supplied to it into the 
finest flour, but the corn must always be supplied. The 
exquisite perfection of his smaller lyrics forbids us to set 
this down as in any sense a drawback. It was rather a 
strong inclination to the one office than an incapacity for 
the other. What is more to the purpose, this peculiarity 
is very closely connected with Dryden's fitness for the posi- 
tion which he held. The man who is to control the peace- 
able revolution of a literature, who is to shape a language 
to new uses, and help writers for a century after his death 
to vocabulary, rhythm, and style, in prose as well as in 
verse, is perhaps all the better off for not being too spon- 
taneous or original in his choice of subjects. But however 
this may be, there is no doubt that outward circumstances 
always had a great, and the greatest, influence upon the de- 
velopment of Dryden's genius. There was in some respects 
a quality about this genius for which it would be hard to 
find an appropriate name. To call such a mind and such 
a talent as Dryden's parasitic would be ridiculous. Yet in 
any lesser man the same characteristics would undoubtedly 
receive that appellation. It seems always to have been, if 
not necessary, at any rate satisfactory to him, to follow some 
lines which had been already laid down, to accept a depart- 
ure from some previous w^ork, to match himself closely with 
some existing performance. It appears almost as if, in his 
extraordinary bare for the manner of his poetical Tvork, he 



VII.] • PEKIOD OF TRANSLATION. 13Y 

felt it an advantage to be relieved of mucli trouble about 
the matter. The accusations of plagiarism which his fran- 
tic enemies constantly brought against him were, in any 
discreditable sense, as idle as accusations of plagiarism 
usually are; but they bad considerably more foundation 
in literal fact than is usual with such accusations. He 
had a habit of catching up phrases sometimes from the 
works of men to whom he was anything but compliment- 
ary, and inserting them, much improved, it is true, for the 
most part, in his own work. I have come across a curi- 
ous'instance of this, which I do not remember to have seen 
anywhere noticed. One of the most mortifying incidents 
in Dry den's literary career was the already mentioned com- 
position by his rival, though not exactly enemy, Crowne, 
of the Masque of Calisto. There seems to be little doubt, 
though the evidence is not entirely conclusive, that 
Crowne's share in this work was due to Rochester, who 
afterwards made himself obnoxious to Dryden's wrath in 
a still more unpardonable manner. Under these circum- 
stances we certainly should not expect to find Dryden 
borrowing from Calisto. Yet a whole line in Macjlecknoe, 
" The fair Augusta much to fears inclined," is taken, with 
the addition of the adjective and the adverb, from a song 
of Crowne's: "Augusta is to fears inclined." This tem- 
perament made the work of translation one peculiarly 
suitable to Dryden. He had, as early as 1684, included 
several translations in his first volume of Miscellanies, and 
he soon perceived that there was plenty of demand for 
more of the same ware. Except his great editor, it is 
doubtful whether any man of letters ever knew the pub- 
lic taste better than Dryden. The call for translations of 
the ancients was quite natural and intelligible. Direct 
cla^siqj^l study was considerably on the wane. So far, in- 
K 7 



138 DRYDEN. [chap. 

deed, as one sex was concerned, it had practically gone 
out of fashion altogether, and women of the accomplish- 
ments of Lady Jane Grey or Queen Elizabeth were now . » 
thought monsters. Even as regards men, a much smaller'" 
proportion of the upper classes were able to read the 
classics in the original than had once been the case. Busi- 
ness, court life, employment in a standing army and navy, 
and many other distractions called men early away from 
their studies. Yet the interest felt, or supposed to be felt, 
in classical literature w^as at least as great as ever. The 
classics were still considered as literary models and pat- 
terns; and the famous controversy between the ancients 
and the moderns which arose about this time helped to 
inspire a desire for some acquaintance with the former in 
the easy, fashionable verse which Dryden had himself 
created. In 1693 he gave to the world the whole of Per- 
sius and much of Juvenal, the latter being completed by 
his sons and some friends. In the same year some more 
versions of Ovid and a little of Homer appeared; and in 
1693 also his greatest work of translation, the Virgil, was 
begun. This was the only one of Dryden's works for 
which he received not wholly inadequate remuneration, 
and this remuneration was attained chiefly by the method 
of subscription. Besides these authors, his translations 
include extracts from Theocritus and Lucretius, a very few 
Odes of Horace, and a considerable portion of the Meta- 
morphoses of Ovid, which appeared last of all in the well- 
known volume of Fables. The merits and peculiarities of 
Dryden's translation are easily estimated. It has been ex- 
cellently remarked in the Preface of a recent prose trans- 
lation of the Odyssey, that there can be no final translation 
of Homer, because the taste and literary habits of each age 
demand different qualities in poetry. There is no need to 



VII.] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. - 139 

limit this remark to Homer, or indeed to poetry. The 
work of the translator is to bridge over the interval be- 
tw^ejft his author and his public, and therefore the con- 
struction and character of the bridge must necessarily dif- 
fer, according to the instruction and demands of the pub- 
lic. Dryden could not give exact accuracy, though he 
was by no means such a bad scholar as Pope. But his 
public did not want exact accuracy, and would not have 
been grateful for it. He did not — whether he was or was 
not able — give them classical flavour and local colour, but 
forlhese they would have been still less grateful. What 
they wanted, and what he could give them as no other 
man then living could, was the matter of the original, tol- 
erably unadulterated, and dressed up in the splendid dic- 
tion and nervous verse which he had himself taught them 
to love. The parallel between the characteristics of the 
translation and the simple device whereby Jacob Tonson 
strove to propitiate the ruling powers in the illustrations 
to the Virgil is indeed obvious enough. Those illustra- 
tions displayed "old Nassau's hook-nosed head on pious 
Eneas' shoulders." The text itself displayed the head of 
Dryden on the shoulders of Virgil. 

Even before the Miscellany of 1684, translations from 
Dryden's hands had been published. There appeared in 
1680 a version of Ovid's H&roides, io which he gave a 
preface and a translation of two epistles, besides collabo- 
rating with Mulgrave in a third. The preface contains 
some good criticism of Ovid, and a defence of the man- 
ner of translation which with little change Dryden himself 
constantly employed. This he defines as being equally 
remote from verbal fidelity and from mere imitation. He 
also lays down a canon as to the necessary equipment of 
a translator, which, if it could be despotically enforced, 



140 DRYDEN. [chap. 

would be a remarkable boon to reviewers. " No man is 
capable of translating poetry who, besides a genius to that 
art, is not a master both of his author's language and of 
his own. Nor must we understand the language only of 
the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expres- 
sions, which are the characters that distinguish, and as it 
were individuate him from all o^her writers." These first 
translations are interesting because they are the first, and 
for the sake of contrast with the later and more perfect 
work of the same kind. In some respects Ovid was an 
unfortunate author for Dryden to select, because his pe- 
culiarities tempted a relapse into the faults of the heroic- 
play style. But, on the other hand, Dry den's practice in 
the heroic play fitted him very well to translate Ovid. A 
few lines from the close of Canace to Macareus may be 
given as an instance — 

" And now appeared the messenger of death ; 
Sad were his looks, and scarce he drew his breath, 
To say, ' Your father sends you ' (with that word 
His trembling hands presented me a sword ;) 
^Your father sends you this ; and lets you know 
That your own crimes the use of it will show.' 
Too well I know the sense those words impart ; 
His present shall be treasured in my heart. 
Are these the nuptial gifts a bride receives ? 
And this the fatal dower a father gives ? 
Thou God of marriage, shun thy own disgrace, 
And take thy torch from this detested place ! 
Instead of that, let furies light their brands, 
And fire my pile with their infernal hands ! 
With happier fortune may my sisters wed, 
Warned by the dire example of the dead. 
For thee, poor babe, what crime could they pretend? 
How could thy infant innocence offend ? 



VII.] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 141 

A guilt there was ; but, oh, that guilt was mine ! 
Thou suffer'st for a sin that was not thine. 
Thy mother's grief and crime ! but just enjoyed, 
Shewn to my sight, and born to be destroyed ! 
Unhappy offspring of my teeming womb ! 
Dragged headlong from thy cradle to thy tomb ! 
Thy unoffending life I could not save, 
Nor weeping could I follow to thy grave ; 
Nor on thy tomb could offer my shorn hair. 
Nor shew the grief which tender mothers bear. 
Yet long thou shalt not from my arms be lost ; 
- For soon I will o'ertake thy infant ghost. 

But thou, my love, and now my love's despair, 

Perform his funerals with paternal care ; 

His scattered limbs with my dead body burn. 

And once more join us in the pious urn. 

If on my wounded breast thou droppest a tear. 

Think for whose sake my breast that wound aid bear ; 

And faithfully my last desires fulfil. 

As I perform my cruel father's will." 

The Miscellanies of 1684 and 1685 contained a con- 
siderable number of translations from many different au- 
thors, and those of 1693 and 1694 added yet more. Al- 
together, besides Ovid and Virgil, specimens of Horace, 
Homer, Theocritus, and Lucretius are in these translations, 
■while the more ambitious and complete versions of Juve- 
nal and Virgil swell the total (in Scott's edition) to four 
volumes, containing perhaps some 30,000 lines. 

It could hardly be expected that in translating authors 
of such different characters, and requiring in a poetical 
translator so many different gifts, Dryden should be al- 
together and equally successful. The Juvenal and the 
Virgil deserve separate notice ; the others may be briefly 
reviewed- All of them are, according to the general con- 
ception of translation which Dryden had formed, decidedly 



142 DRYDEN. [c&a?. 

loose, and by no means adhere to the original. Indeed, 
Dryden not unfreqnently inserts whole lines and passages 
of his own, a proceeding scarcely to be reconciled with the 
just-inentioned conception. On the whole, he is perhaps 
most successful with Ovid. The versions of Horace are 
few, and by no means excessively Horatian, but they are 
almost all good poems in Dryden's statelier rhythm. The 
version into a kind of Pindaric of the twenty-ninth ode of 
the third book is particularly good, and contains the well- 
known paraphrase of resigno quce dedit ("I puff the pros- 
titute away "), which was such a favourite with Thackeray 
that he puts it into the mouth, if I remember rightl}?^, of 
more than one of his characters. Indeed, the three last 
stanzas of this are well worth quotation — 

yiii. 

" Happy the man, and happy he alone, 
He, who can call to-day his own ; 
He who, secure within, can say, 
• To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day ; 
Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, 
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine •. 
Not heaven itself upon the past has power, 
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour. 

IX. 

" Fortune, that with malicious joy 

Does man, her slave, oppress. 
Proud of her office to destroy, 

Is seldom pleased to bless : 
Still various and unconstant still, 
But with an inclination to be ill, 
Promotes, degrades, delights in strife, 
And makes a lottery of life. 
I can enjoy her while she's kind ; 
But when she dances in the wind, 



ni.] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 143 

And shakes the wings and will not stay, 

I puff the prostitute away : 

The little or the much she gave is quietly resigned ; 

Content with poverty, my soul I arm. 

And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm. 

X. 

" What is't to me, 
Who never sail in her unfaithful sea, 
If storms arise and clouds grow black. 
If the mast split, and threaten wreck ? 
m Then let the greedy merchant fear 

For his ill-gotten gain ; 
And pray to gods that will not hear. 
While the debating winds and billows bear 

His wealth into the main. 
For me, secure from fortune's blows, 
Secure of what I cannot lose. 

In my small pinnace I can sail. 
Contemning all the blustering roar; 

And running with a merry gale. 
With friendly stars my safety seek. 
Within some little winding creek. 
And see the storm ashore." 

Least successful of all, perhaps, are the Theocritean 
translations. The idyllic spirit was not one of the many 
which would come at Dryden's call, and certain peculiari- 
ties of Theocritus, harmless enough in the original, are 
accentuated and magnified in the copy in a manner by no 
means pleasant. A thing more unfortunate still was the 
selection made from Lucretius. No one was ever better 
qualified to translate the greatest of Roman poets than 
Dryden ; and had he given us the whole, it would probably 
have been the best verse translation in the language. As 
it is, he has done few things better than the selections 
from the second and third books ; but that from the fourth 



144 DRYDEN. [chap. 

has, justly or unjustly, tainted the whole in the eyes of 
most critics. It reproduces only too nakedly the original 
where it would be better left alone, and it fails almost 
entirely even to attempt the sombre fury of sentiment, the 
inexpressible agony of regret, which transfuse and redeem 
that original itself. The first book of Homer and part of 
the sixth were avowedly done as an experiment, and it is 
difficult to be very sorry that the experiment was not pur- 
sued farther. But the versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses 
are very good. They, however, belong more properly to 
the next period, that of the Fables. 

Dryden's Juvenal is not the least remarkable, and has 
been in some ways'among the most fortunate of his works. 
It is still, if there be any such, the standard verse transla- 
tion of the great Roman satirist, and this although much 
of it is not Dryden's. His two elder sons assisted him in 
the work, as well as some friends. But the first, third, 
sixth, tenth, and sixteenth satires are his own, as well as 
the whole of the Persius. The book was published in 
1693, addressed to Dorset, with a prefatory essay or dis-- 
course on satire, which is of great interest and value. It 
'is somewhat discursive, as is Dryden's wont, and the erudi- 
tion which it contains is, as is also his wont, anything 
but invariably, accurate. But it contains some precious 
autobiographic information, much capital criticism, and 
some of the best passages of its author's prose. He dis- 
tinguishes between his own idea of satire and Juvenal's, 
approaching the former to that of Horace, which, how- 
ever, is scarcely a tenable position. But, as has been suf- 
ficiently pointed out already, there are actually many and 
grave differences between the satire of Dryden and that 
of Juvenal. The former rarely or never even simulates 
indignation ; the latter constantly and invariably expresses 



m] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 145 

it. Still, the poetical resemblances between the two men 
are sufficiently close to make the expectation of a valuable 
version pretty confident, nor is that expectation disap- 
pointed. For a wonder Dry den resists, for the most part, 
his unhappy tendency to exaggerate the coarseness of his 
subjects, and to choose their coarsest parts in preference 
to others. No version of Juvenal could be other than 
shocking to those accustomed only to modern standards 
of literary language ; but this version is perhaps less so 
than might be expected. The vigorous stamp of Dryden's 
verse is, moreover, admirably suited to represent the orig- 
inal, and the chief fault noticeable in it — a fault not un- 
common with Dryden in translating — is an occasional 
lapse into an unpoetical vernacular, with the object, doubt- 
less, of representing the text more vividly to English read- 
ers. The Persius is in this respect better than the 
Juvenal, though the peculiar dryness of flavour of the 
singular original is scarcely retained. 

It is not known exactly when Dryden first conceived 
the idea of working up the scattered fragments of Vir- 
gilian translation which he had as yet attempted into a 
whole. The task, however, was regularly begun either at 
the end of 1693 or the beginning of 1694, and it occupied 
the best part of three years. A good deal of interest was 
generally felt in the proceeding, and many friends helped 
the poet with books or literary assistance of one kind or 
another. A great deal of it, too, was written during 
visits to hospitable acquaintances in the country. Much 
of it was doubtless done in Northamptonshire and Hun- 
tingdonshire, at the houses of Mrs. Creed and of Driden of 
Chesterton. There is, indeed, a universally repeated tra- 
dition that the first lines were written with a diamond on 
a window in this latter mansion. The house was pulled 
1* 



146 DRYBEK. [<mAK 

down some seventy years ago, and a curious argument 
against the truth of the legend has been made out of the 
fact that the pane was not preserved. Demolition, how- 
ever, is not usually careful of its prey. Much was certainly 
written at Denham Court, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of 
Sir William Bowyer, whose gardens are commemorated in 
a note on the Georgics. The seventh book of the -<^neid 
was done at Burleigh, Dryden having long had some con- 
nexion with the Exeter family. He had, it may be men- 
tioned, always been fond of writing in the country. Ton- 
son, the publisher, was exceedingly anxious that the book 
should be dedicated to William HI., and Dryden speaks as 
if certain anticipations of gain had been held out to him 
in such a case. But he was unfalteringly determined to 
do nothing that would look like an abandonment of his 
principles. No single person received the honor of the 
dedication; but each division of the work was inscribed 
to a separate patron. The Eclogues fell to the lot of Lord 
Clifford, Dryden's co-religionist, and son of the " fierce and 
brave" if not very high-principled member of the Cabal 
to whom Amboyna had been dedicated long before. The 
Georgics were inscribed to Lord Chesterfield, a dedication 
which, with Dryden's subsequent reception and acknowl- 
edgment of a present from Chesterfield, is at least deci- 
sive against the supposed connexion between Lady Eliza- 
beth and the Earl having been known to the poet. Mul- 
grave, now Marquis of Normanby, had the ^neid. The 
book was published in July, 1697, and the edition was 
sold off almost within the year. Dryden speaks to his 
sons, who were now at Rome, where they had employment 
in the Pope's household, with great pleasure of its success. 
It is, in truth, a sufficiently remarkable book. It was, no 
doubt, rather ironical of fate to assign Homer to Pope, 



m.] PERIOD OF TRAJs^SLATlON. U1 

who was of all poets the least Homeric, and Virgil to Dry- 
den, than whom not many poets have been more un-Vir- 
gilian. Pope would have done the Mantuan, whom in 
many things he resembles, excellently. Dryden has done 
him excellently too, only that the spirit of the translation 
is entirely different from that of the original. To say 
after Wordsworth that Dryden " spoils" all the best pas- 
sages is quite unfair. But Wordsworth had no special 
faculty of criticism in the classical languages, and was 
of.all recorded poets the most niggardly of praise, and 
the most prone to depreciation of others. Of the three 
parts as wholes the Georgics are perhaps done best, the 
Eclogues worst, the ^neid with most inequality. Yet the 
best passages of the epic are the best, beyond all doubt,.of 
the whole version. A certain delicacy of touch, which Vir- 
gil especially requires, and of which Dryden was sufficient- 
ly master in his more original work, has often failed, him 
here, but the bolder and more masculine passages are rep- 
resented with a great deal of success. Those who believe, 
as I confess I myself believe, that all translation is unsat- 
isfactory, and that poetical translation of poetry is nearly 
impossible, must of course always praise such work as this 
with a very considerable reservation. But when that res- 
ervation is made, there remains plenty of fairly disposa- 
ble praise for this, Dryden's most considerable undertak- 
ing of a single and complete kind. The older translations 
have so far gone out of general reading in England that 
citation is in this case almost indispensable, as well for the 
purpose of showing what Dryden actually did give his 
readers in this famous book, as for that of exhibiting the 
progress he had made since the Ovid of sixteen years be- 
fore. The passage I have chosen is the well-known open- 
ing of the descent into hell in the sixth book, which has 



148 DRYDEN. [chap. 

not many superiors either in the original or in the version. 
The subject was one that Dryden could handle well, where- 
as his Dido sometimes shows traces of incongruity — 

" She said, and passed along the gloomy space ; 
The prince pursued her steps with equal pace. 
Ye realms, yet unrevealed to human sight ! 
Ye gods, who rule the regions of the night ! 
Ye gliding ghosts ! permit me to relate 
The mystic wotiiders of your silent state. 
Obscure they went through dreary shades, that led 
Along the waste dominions of the dead. 
Thus wander travellers in woods by night, 
By the moon's doubtful and malignant light, 
When Jove in dusky clouds involves the skies, 
And the faint crescent shoots by fits before their eyes. 
Just in the gate, and in the jaws of hell. 
Revengeful Cares and sullen Sorrows dwell, 
And pale Diseases and repining Age, 
Want, Fear, and Famine's unresisted rage ; 
Here Toils, and Death, and Death's half-brother Sleep, 
(Forms terrible to view) their centry keep ; 
With anxious Pleasures of a guilty mind. 
Deep Frauds before, and open Force behind ; 
The Furies' iron beds ; and Strife, that shakes 
Her hissing tresses, and unfolds her snakes. 
Full in the midst of this infernal road, 
An elm displays her dusky arms abroad : 
The god of sleep there hides his heavy head, 
And empty dreams on every leaf are spread. 
Of various forms unnumbered spectres more, 
Centaurs, and double shapes, besiege the door. 
Before the passage, horrid Hydra stands. 
And Briareus with all his hundred hands ; 
Gorgons, Geryon with his triple frame ; 
And vain Chimsera vomits empty flame. 
The chief unsheathed his shining steel, prepared, 
Though seized with sudden fear, to force the guard, 



vil] period of translation. 149 

Offering bis brandished weapon at their face ; 
Had not the Sibyl stopped his eager pace, 
And told him what those empty phantoms were — 
Forms without bodies, and impassive air." 

Owing to the existence of some letters to Tonson, 
Walsh, and others, more is known about the pecuniary 
side of this transaction than about most of Dryden's mon- 
ey affairs. Tonson was an exceedingly hard bargain- 
driver, and there is extant a curious letter of his, in which 
he complains of the number of verses he has for his 
money, a complaint which, as we shall see when we come 
to the Fables^ was at any rate in that case grossly unjust, 
Tlie book was published by subscription, as Pope's Homer 
was subsequently, but the terms were not nearly so profit- 
able to the poet. A hundred and two five -guinea sub- 
scribers had each his arms printed at the foot of one of 
the hundred and two plates. Others who subscribed only 
two guineas merely figured in a list of names. But except 
a statement by Dryden in a letter that "the thirty shil- 
lings upon every book remains with me," the proportion in 
which the subscriptions were divided between author and 
publisher is unknown. He had, however, as Malone thinks, 
50/. for each book of the jEneid — as Mr. Christie and Mr. 
Hooper think, 50/. for each two books — and no doubt 
there was some similar payment for the Eclogues and 
Georgics. Altogether Pope heard that he made 1200/. by 
the Virgil. Presents too were doubtless sent him by Clif- 
ford and Mulgrave, as well as by Chesterfield. But Ton- 
son's payments were anything but satisfactory, and Lord 
Macaulay has extracted much evidence as to the state of 
the coinage from Dryden's indignant letters on the subject. 
At one time he complains that in some money changed 
for Lady Elizabeth by Tonson, " besides the clipped radney 



150 DRYDEN. [dHAP. 

there were at least forty sMlHngs brass." Then he ex- 
pects " good silver, not such as he had formerly," and will 
not take gold, of course because of the renewed risk of 
bad money in change. Then complaints are made of Ton- 
son for refusing subscriptions (which shows that a consid- 
erable portion of the subscription-money must have gone 
to the poet), for declining to pay anything for notes, 
and so on. The most complimentary thing to Tonson in 
the correspondence is the remark, "All of your trade are 
sharpers, and you not more than others." In the next 
letter, however, the suspicion as to the goodness of Ton- 
son's money returns — "If you have any silver which will 
go, my wife will be glad of it." Elsewhere there is a half- 
apologetic allusion to a "sharp" letter which seems not to 
have been preserved. But Dryden had confidence enough 
in his publisher to make hira do various pieces of fiduciary 
business for him, such as to receive his rents which had 
been brought up from Northamptonshire by the Towces- 
ter carrier, to get bills to pay a suspicious watchmaker who 
would not take gold, and the like. He, too, was the in- 
termediary by which Dryden sent letters to his sons who 
were now in Rome, and he is accused of great carelessness 
and perhaps something worse in connexion with these let- 
ters. In another epistle we hear that "the printer is a 
beast," an accusation which it is to be feared has been 
repeated frequently since by impatient authors. After- 
wards, in rather Landorian style — indeed, there are resem- 
blances more than one between the two, and Landor was 
a constant admirer of Dryden — he " vows to God that if 
Everingham, the printer, takes not care of this impression, 
he shall never print anything more for him." These 
letters to Tonson about the Virgil and the Fables are 
among the most interesting memorials of Dryden that we 



Yii.] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 151 

possess, and tbey are, with those to Mrs. Steward, almost 
the only letters of his which give much personal detail.^ 
Perhaps it is not superfluous to say that allusions in them 
to his wife are frequent, and show nothing either of any 
ill-feeling between the two, or of any neglect of household 
duty on her part. To one of the letters to his sons is a 
long postscript from Lady Elizabeth, in perhaps the most 
remarkable orthography that even English epistolary his- 
tory has to show, but affectionate and motherly enough. 

During the period which the last two chapters cover, 
Dry'den had as usual not failed to undertake several minor 
and miscellaneous literary tasks. JSleonora, in 1692, was 
one of his least successful pieces in a literary point of view, 
but perhaps the most successful of all as a piece of journey- 
work. The poem is an elegy on the Countess of Abing- 
don ; it was ordered by her husband, and paid for munifi- 
cently. There are but 377 verses, and the fee was five 
hundred guineas, or on Tonson's method of calculation 
some seven or eight-and-twenty shillings a line — a rate 
which would have seemed to Jacob sinful, as encouraging 
poets to be extortionate with honest tradesmen. The 
piece is laboured and ill -sustained. If it deserved five 
hundred guineas, the Anne Killigrew ode would certainly 
have been cheap at five thousand. But not long after- 
wards a poem to Sir Godfrey Kneller, which may or may 
not have been exchanged for something of the other ar- 
tist's craft, showed that Dryden had in no way lost his fac- 
ulty of splendid flattery. Perhaps before and perhaps af- 
ter this came the incomparable address to Congreve on the 

* As, for instance, how (he is writing from Northamptonshire) a 
party of benighted strangers came in, and he had to give up his bed 
to them, to which bed they would have gone supperless, had he not 
" taken a very lusty pike t]iat day." 



152 DRYDEN. [chap. yii. 

failure of the Double Dealer, which is and deserves to 
be one of Dryden's best -known works. Congreve and 
Southern, the leading comic writer and the leading tragic 
writer of the younger generation, were among the princi- 
pal of the band of sons (in Ben Jonson's phrase) whom 
Dryden had now gathered round him. In one of his let- 
ters there is a very pleasant picture of the two young men 
coming out four miles to meet the coach as he returned 
from one of his Northamptonshire visits, and escorting him 
to his house. This was in 1695, and in the same year 
Dryden brought out a prose translation of Du Fresnoy's 
Art of Painting, with a prefatory essay called a " Parallel 
of Poetry and Painting." There is not very much in- 
trinsic value in this parallel, but it has an accidental in- 
terest of a curious kind. Dryden tells us that it occupied 
him for twelve mornings, and we are therefore able to cal- 
culate his average rate of working, since neither the mat- 
ter nor the manner of the work betokens any extraordina- 
ry care, nor could it have required extraordinary research. 
The essay would fill between thirty and forty pages of the 
size of this present. Either in 1695 or in 1696 the poet 
also wrote a life of Lucian, intended to accompany a trans- 
lation of the Dialogues made by various hands. This too, 
which did not appear till after the author's death, was 
something of a " pot-boiler;" but the character of Dryden's 
prose work was amply redeemed by the " Discourse on 
Epic Poetry," which was the form that the dedication of 
the ^neid to Mulgrave took. This is not unworthy to 
rank with the "Essay on Dramatic Poesy " and the "Dis- 
course oa Satire." 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE FABLES. 



It was beyond a doubt his practice in translation, and the 
remarkable success that attended it, which suggested to 
Dryden the last, and one of the most singular, but at the 
same time the most brilliantly successful of all his poetical 
experiments. His translations themselves were in many 
cases rather paraphrases than translations. He now con- 
ceived the idea of a kind of composition which was to be 
avowedly paraphrase. With the unfailing catholicity of 
taste wnich is one of his finest literary characteristics, he 
had always avoided the ignorant contempt with which the 
age was wont to look on mediaeval literature. Even Cow- 
ley, we are told, when requested by one of his patrons to 
give an opinion on Chaucer, confessed that he could not 
relish him. If, when lie planned an Arthurian epic, Dry- 
den had happened to hit on the idea of "transversing" 
Mallory, we might have had an additional star of the first 
magnitude in English literature, though his ability to pro- 
duce a wholly original epic may be doubted. At sixty- 
seven, writing hard for subsistence, he could not think of 
any such mighty attempt as this. But he took certain 
tales of Chaucer, and certain novels of Chaucer's master, 
Boccaccio, and applied his system to them. The result 

was the book of poems to which, including as it did many 
L 



154 DRYDEN. [chap. 

Ovidian translations, and mucli other verse, lie gave the 
name of Fables, using that word in its simple sense of sto- 
ries. It is not surprising that this book took the town 
by storm. Enthusiastic critics, even at the beginning of 
the present century, assigned to Theodore and Honoria " a 
place on the very topmost shelf of English poetry." Such 
arrangements depend, of course, upon the definition of poe- 
try itself. But I venture to think that it would be almost 
sufficient case against any such definition, that it should 
exclude the finest passages of the Fables from a position a 
little lower than that which Ellis assigned to them. It so 
happens that we are, at the present day, in a position to 
put Dryden to a specially crucial test which his contempo- 
raries were unable to apply. To us Chaucer is no longer 
an ingenious and intelligent but illegible barbarian. We 
read the Canterbury Tales with as much relish, and with 
nearly as little difficulty, as we read Spenser, or Milton, or 
Pope, or Byron, or our own living poets. Palamon and 
Arcite has, therefore, to us the drawback — if drawback it 
be — of being confronted on equal terms with its original. 
Yet I venture to say that, except in the case of those un- 
fortunate persons whose only way of showing appreciation 
of one thing is by depreciation of something else, an ac- 
quaintance with the Knight'' s Tale injures Dry den's work 
hardly at all. There could not possibly be a severer test 
of at least formal excellence than this. 

The Fables were published in a folio volume which, ac- 
cordino; to the contract with Tonson, was to contain 10,000 
verses. The payment was 300/., of which 250 guineas 
were paid down at the time of agreement, when three- 
fourths of the stipulated number of lines were actually 
handed over to the publisher. On this occasion, at least, 
Jacob had not to complain of an unduly small considera- 



VIII.] THE FABLES. 155 

tion. For Dry den gave him not 2500, but nearly 5000 
v»erses more, without, as far as is known, receiving any in- 
crease of his fee. The remainder of the 300^. was not to 
be paid till the appearance of a second edition, and this 
did not actually take place until some years after the poet's 
death. Pope's statement, therefore, that Dryden received 
" sixpence a line " for his verses, though not formally ac- 
curate, was suflSciently near the truth. It is odd that one 
of the happiest humours of Tom the First (Shadwell) oc- 
curring in a play written long before he quarrelled with 
Dryden, concerns this very practice of payment by line. 
In, the Sullen Lovers one of the characters complains that 
his bookseller has refused him twelvepence a line, when the 
intrinsic worth of some verses is at least ten shillings, and 
all can be proved to be worth three shillings " to the veri- 
est Jew in Christendom." So that Tonson was not alone 
in the adoption of the method. As the book finally ap- 
peared, the Fables contained, besides prefatory matter and 
dedications, five pieces from Chaucer {Palamon and ArcitSj 
the Cock and the Fox, the Flower and the Leaf, the Wife 
of Bath's Tale, the Character of a Good Parson), three 
from Boccaccio {^Sigismonda and Guiscardo, Theodore and 
Honoria, Cymon and Iphigenia), the first book of the Iliad, 
some versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses in continuation of 
others previously published, an Epistle to John Driden, the 
second St. Cecilia Ode, commonly called Alexander's Feast, 
and an Epitaph. 

The book was dedicated to the Duke of Ormond in a 
prose epistle, than which even Dryden never did anything 
better. It abounds with the fanciful expressions, just stop- 
ping short of conceit, which were such favourites with him, 
and which he managed perhaps better than any other writ- 
er. He holds of the Ormond family, he tells the Duke, 



156 DRYDEN. [chap. 

by a tenure of dedications, having paid that compliment to 
his Grace's grandfather, the great Duke of Ormond, and 
having celebrated Ossory in memorial verses. Livy, Pub- 
licola, and the history of Peru are brought in perhaps 
somewhat by the head and shoulders; but this was sim- 
ply the fashion of the time, and the manner of the doing 
fully excused it. Even this piece, however, falls short, in 
point of graceful flattery, of the verse dedication of Pala- 
mon and Arcite to the Duchess. Between the two is the 
preface, which contains a rather interesting history of the 
genesis of the Fables, After doing the first book of 
Homer " as an essay to the whole work," it struck Dryden 
that he would try some of the passages on Homeric sub- 
jects in the Metamorphoses, and these in their turn led to 
others. When he had sufficiently extracted the sweets of 
Ovid, " it came into my mind that our old English poet 
Chaucer in many things resembled him;" and then, "as 
thoughts, according to Mr. Hobbes, have always some con- 
nexion," he was led to think of Boccaccio. The preface 
continues with critical remarks upon all three authors and 
their position in the history of their respective literatures, 
remarks which, despite some almost unavoidable ignorance 
on the writer's part as to the early condition and mutual 
relationship of modern languages, are still full of interest 
and value. It ends a little harshly, but naturally enough, 
in a polemic with Blackmore, Milbourn, and Collier. Not 
much need be said about the causes of either of these de- 
bates. Macaulay has told the Collier story well, and, on 
the whole, fairly enough, though he is rather too compli- 
mentary to the literary value of Collier's work. That 
redoubtable divine had all the right on his side, beyond a 
doubt, but he sometimes carried his argument a good deal 
too far. Dryden, however, could not defend himself, and 



vm.] THE FABLES. 157 

he knew this, and did not attempt it, though he could not 
always refrain, now and afterwards, from indulging in lit- 
tle flings at Collier. Blackmore had two causes of quarrel 
with Dry den — one the same as Collier's, the other a polit- 
ical one, the poetjcal knight being a staunch Whig. Mil- 
bourn was an obscure country clergyman, who had at one 
time been a great admirer of Dryden, as a letter of his still 
extant, in which he orders the poet's works to be sent to 
him, shows. He had, however, fallen foul of the Virgil., 
for which he received from Dryden due and perhaps more 
than due castigation. 

Enough has been already said of the translations of 
Homer and Ovid. The latter, however, are, as far as mere 
verse goes, among the best of all the translations. Pala^ 
mon and Arcite, however, and all the other contents of the 
book are of a very different order of interest. Dryden had 
an extreme admiration for this story, which as the subject 
for an epic he thought as good as either Homer's or Vir- 
gil's. Nowadays most people have left off considering 
the technical value of different subjects, which is no doubt 
a misfortune. But it is easy to see that the legend, with 
its interesting incidents, its contrast of character, its revo^ 
lutions, and so forth, does actually come very near to the 
perfect idea of the artificial epic. The comparative nullity 
of the heroine would have been thought no drawback in 
ancient art. Dryden has divided the story into three 
books, and has, as usual, paraphrased with the utmost free- 
dom, but he has kept closer to the dimensions of the orig- 
inal than is his wont. His three books do not much ex- 
ceed the length of the original tale. In the different 
parts, however, he has used his own discretion in amplify- 
ing or contracting exactly as he thinks proper, and the 
comparison of different passages with the original thus 



158 DRYDEN. [diAP. 

brings out in a manifold way the idiosyncrasies of the two 
writers. Perhaps this is nowhere more marked than in 
the famous description of the Temple of Mars. As far 
as the temple itself goes, Dryden has the upper hand, but 
he is beaten when it comes to " the portraiture which was 
upon the wall." Sometimes he has simply adopted Chau- 
cer's very words, sometimes he has done otherwise, and 
then he has almost always done worse. The " smiler with 
the knife under the cloak " is very inadequately replaced 
by three whole lines about hypocrisy. If the couplet — 

"Amiddes of the temple sate Mischance, 
And Discomfort and sory Countenance," 

be contrasted with 

" In midst of all the dome Misfortune sate, 
And gloomy Discontent and fell Debate," 

the comparatively otiose epithets which in the next cen- 
tury were to be the curse of the style, strike the eye and 
ear very forcibly. Indeed, in this most finished work of 
Dry den's nothing is easier than to see the strength and the 
weakness of the method he had introduced. In his hands 
it turns almost always to strength. But in thus boldly 
bringing his work side by side with Chaucer's, he had 
indicated the divergence which was to be carried farther 
and farther by his followers, until the mot propre yvB.s lost 
altogether in a washy sea of elegant epithets and flowing 
versification. That time, however, was far off, or might 
have seemed to be far off, to a reader of the Fables. It is 
only when Chaucer is actually compared that the defects, 
or rather the possibilities of defect, rise to the eye. If 
Palamon and Arcite be read by itself, it is almost entirely 
delightful, and, as has been said already, it will even bear 
the strain of comparison. For the loss is counterbalanced 



VIII.] THE FABLES. 159 

by gain, gain of sustained strength and greater perfection 
of workmanship, even though we may know well enough 
that Dryden's own idea of Chaucer's shortcomings in versi- 
fication was a mere delusion. 

The Nuri's PriesVs Tale was also not very much ex- 
tended, though it was considerably altered in Dryden's 
version, entitled The Cock and the Fox. Dryden's fond- 
ness for the beast-story had, as we have seen already, drawn 
upon him the reprehension of Messrs. Prior and Montague, 
critics of severe and cultivated taste. It has just been sug- 
gested that a great loss has been sustained by his not hav- 
ing taken the fancy to transverse some Arthurian stories. 
In the same way, if he had known the original Roman de 
Renart, he would doubtless have made good use of it. The 
Cock and the Fox itself is inferior to many of the branches 
of the old tree, but it has not a few merits, and the story 
of the two friends is one of the very best things of the 
kind. To this Dryden has done ample justice. But in 
the original not the least attractive part is the solemn pro- 
fusion of learned names and citations characteristic of the 
fourteenth century, which the translator has in some cases 
thought it better to omit. It may not be quite clear 
whether Chaucer, who generally had a kind of satirical un- 
dercurrent of intention in him, was serious in putting these 
into the mouths of Partlet and Chanticleer or not, but still 
one misses them. On the other hand, Dryden has made 
the most of the astrological allusions; for it must be re- 
membered that he had a decided hankering after astrology, 
like many of the greatest men of his century. Of this 
there is evidence quite apart from Mrs. Thomas's stories, 
which also deal with the point. 

The third of Dryden's Chaucerian versions is one of the 
most charming of all, and this, though the variations from 



160 DRYDEN". [ciup. 

tlie original are considerable, and though that original is 
itself one of the most delightful works of the kind/ I 
have read, perhaps as much as most Englishmen, the French 
fourteenth-century poetry on which so much of Chaucer's 
is modelled, but I hardly know either in French or English 
a poem more characteristic, and more delightfully charac- 
teristic of the fourteenth century than the Flower and the 
Leaf. The delight in a certain amiable kind of natural 
beauty, the transference of the signs and symbols of that 
beauty to the service of a fantastic and yet not unnatural 
poetry of lo^ e, the introduction of abstract and supernatu- 
ral beings to carry out, sometimes by allegory and some- 
times by personification, the object of the poet, are all ex- 
emplified in this little piece of some 500 or 600 lines, in 
a manner which it would be hard to match in Froissart or 
Guillauine de Machault. Yet Dryden has asserted his 
power of equalling the virtue of the original in what may 
be called an original translation. The two poems differ 
from one another considerably in details of machinery and 
imagery. Chaucer is happier in his descriptions of nature, 
Dryden in the representation of the central personages. 
But both alike have the power of transporting. Even now, 
when so much of his language and machinery have become 
hackneyed, Dryden can exert this power on those who are 
well acquainted with mediaeval literature, who have felt its 
strange fascination, and the ease with which it carries off 
the reader into unfamiliar and yet delightful lands, where 
nothing is disturbing and unreasonable, and yet everything 
is surprising and unhackneyed. How much more strongly 
this power must have been exerted on a singularly prosaic 
age, in which the majority of persons would, like Prior 

* I do not here concern myself with the hypothesis of the spuria 
ousness of this poem. 



viii.] THE FABLES. 161 

and Montague, have cast aside as nonsense worthy only of 
children the gracious, shadowy imaginations of mediaeval 
thought, we in the nineteenth century can hardly put our- 
selves in the condition to estimate. But it must always 
remain one of Dryden's highest titles to fame that he was 
able thus to make extremes meet. He seems, indeed, to 
have had not only the far from ordinary faculty of recog- 
nising good literature wherever he met it, but the quite ex- 
traordinary faculty of making other people recognise it too 
by translating it into the language which they were capa- 
ble-of comprehending. A passage may be worth quoting : 

" To this the dame replied : ' Fair daughter, know 
That what you saw was all a fairy show ; 
And all those airy shapes you now behold 
Were human bodies once, and clothed with earthly mould. 
Our souls, not yet prepared for upper light, 
Till doomsday wander in the shades of night ; 
This only holiday of all the year, 
We, privileged, in sunshine may appear ; 
With songs and dance we celebrate the day, 
And with due honours usher in the May. 
At other times we reign by night alone. 
And posting through the skies pursue the moon ; 
But when the morn arises, none are found, 
For cruel Demogorgon walks the round, 
And if he finds a fairy lag in light. 
He drives the wretch before, and lashes into night, 

" 'All courteous are by kind ; and ever proud 
With friendly offices to help the good. 
In every land we have a larger space 
Than what is known to you of mortal race ; 
Where we with green adorn our fairy bowers, 
And even this grove, unseen before, is ours. 
Know farther, every lady clothed in white. 
And crowned with oak and laurel every knight, 
8 



162 DRYDEN. [ghap. 

Are servants to the Leaf, by liveries known 

Of innocence ; and I myself am one. 

Saw you not her so graceful to behold, 

In white attire, and crowned with radiant gold ? 

The sovereign lady of our land is she, 

Diana called, the queen of chastity ; 

And, for the spotless name of maid she bears, 

That Agnus castics in her hand appears ; 

And all her train, with leafy chaplets crowned, 

Were for unblaraed virginity renowned ; 

But those the chief and highest in command 

Who bear those holy branches in their hand, 

The knights adorned with laurel crowns are they, 

Whom death nor danger ever could dismay. 

Victorious names, who made the world obey : 

Who, while they lived, in deeds of arms excelled, 

And after death for deities were held. 

But those who wear the woodbine on their brow, 

Were knights of love, who never broke their vow ;. 

Firm to their plighted faith, and ever free 

From fears, and fickle chance, and jealousy. 

The lords and ladies, who the woodbine bear. 

As true as Tristram and Isotta were.' " 

Why Dryden selected the Wife of Bath's Tale among 
his few translations from Chaucer, it is not very easy to 
say. It is a sufficiently havmle&s fabliau, but it cannot be 
said to come up in point of merit to many others of the 
Canterbury/ Tales. The enemies of our poet would doubt- 
less say that he selected it because of the unfavourable 
opinions as to womankind which it contains. But then 
those same enemies would find it difficult to say why he 
did not choose instead the scandalous prologue which 
unites opinions of womankind at least as unfavourable 
with other matter of the sort which hostile criticism sup- 
poses to have been peculiarly tempting to Dryden. In the 
actual tale as given in the Fables there is some alloy of 



VIII.] THE FABLES. 163 

this kind, but nothing that could be at all shocking to the 
age. The length of the story is in proportion more am- 
plified than is the case with the others. Probably the 
argumentative gifts of the old hag who turned out not to 
be an old hag attracted Dryden, for he was always at his 
best, and must have known that he was always at his best, 
in passages of the kind. The pleading of the crone is one 
of his best efforts. A certain desultoriness which is to 
be found in Chaucer is changed into Dryden's usual chain 
of serried argument, and it is much less surprising in the 
translation than in the original that the knight should 
have decided to submit at once to such a she-lawyer. But 
the " wife " herself has something to complain of Dryden. 
Her fancy for widowhood is delicately enough put in the 
original : 

" [Sende] grace to overlive them that we wed." 

Dryden makes it much blunter: 

" May widows wed as often as they can, 
And ever for the better change their man." 

The Character of a Good Parson admits itself to be 
" enlarged " from Chaucer, and, indeed, the termination, 
to the extent of some forty lines, is wholly new, and writ- 
ten with special reference to the circumstances of the 
time. To this character there is a pleasant little story 
attached. It seems from a letter to Pepys that the diarist 
had himself recommended the character in the original to 
Dryden's notice. When the verses were done, the poet 
told Pepys of the fact, and proposed to bring them for 
his inspection. The answer contained a sentence which 
displays a much greater antipathy to parsons than that 
which, if .we may believe Lord Macaulay, who perhaps 



1B4 DRYDEN. [cSAP. 

borrowed the idea from Stillingfleet or Collier, Dryden 
himself felt. Pepys remarks that he hopes " from your 
copy of this good parson to fancy some amends made me 
for the hourly offence I bear with from the sight of so 
many lewd originals." What particular trouble Pepys 
had to bear at the hands of the lewd originals it would 
be hard to say. But — time-server as he had once been — 
he was in all probability sufficiently Jacobite at heart to 
relish the postscript in Dryden's version. This transfers 
the circumstances of the expulsion of the Nonjurors to the 
days of Richard the Second and Henry of Bolingbroke. 
Nor, had there still been a censorship of the press, is it at 
all probable that this postscript would have been passed for 
publication. The following verses are sufficiently pointed: 

" Conquest, an odious name, was laid aside ; 
When all submitted, none the battle tried. 
The senseless plea of right by providence 
"Was by a flattering priest invented since, 
And lasts no longer than the present sway, 
But justifies the next which comes in play. 
The people's right remains ; let those who dare 
Dispute their power when they the judges are." 

The character itself is also very much enlarged ; so much 
so that the original can only be said to have furnished the 
heads for it. Dryden has done few better things. 

The selections from Boccaccio, like those from Chaucer, 
may or may not have been haphazard. The first, at any 
rate, which has been, as a rule, the worst thought of, ex- 
plains itself sufficiently. The story of Tancred and Sigis- 
munda, perhaps, afforded room for " loose descriptions ;" 
it certainly afforded room for the argument in verse of 
which Dryden was so great a master. Although the hints 
of the original have been somewhat coarsely amplified, the 



VIII.] THE FABLES. 165 

speech of Sigismunda is still a very noble piece of verse, 
and her final address to her husband's heart almost better. 
Here is a specimen : 

" ' Thy praise (and thine was then the public voice) 
First recommended Guiscard to my choice: 
Directed thus by thee, I looked, and found 
A man I thought deserving to be crowned ; 
First by my father pointed to my sight, 
Nor less conspicuous by his native light ; 
^ His mind, his mien, the features of his face, 

Excelling all the rest of human race : 
These were thy thoughts, and thou couldst judge aright, 
Till interest made a Jaundice in thy sight. 
Or, should I grant thou didst not rightly see, 
Then thou wert first deceived, and I deceived by thee. 
But if thou shalt allege, through pride of mind, 
Thy blood with one of base condition joined, 
'Tis false, for 'tis not baseness to be poor : 
His poverty augments thy crime the more ; 
Upbraids thy justice with the scant regard 
Of worth ; whom princes praise, they should reward. 
Are these the kings intrusted by the crowd 
With wealth, to be dispensed for common good ? 
The people sweat not for their king's delight, 
To enrich a pimp, or raise a parasite ; 
Theirs is the toil ; and he who well has served 
His country, has his country's wealth deserved. 
Even mighty monarchs oft are meanly bom, 
And kings by birth to lowest rank return ; 
All subject to the power of giddy chance. 
For fortune can depress or can advance ; 
But true nobility is of the mind. 
Not given by chance, and not to chance resigned. 

" ' For the remaining doubt of thy decree. 
What to resolve, and how dispose of me ; 
Be warned to cast that useless care aside— 
. Myself alone will for myself provide. 



166 DEYDEN. [chap. 

If, in thy doting and decrepit age, 
Thy soul, a stranger in thy youth to rage, 
Begins in cruel deeds to take delight. 
Gorge with my blood thy barbarous appetite ; 
For I so little am disposed to pray 
For life, I would not cast a wish away. 
Such as it is, the offence is all my own ; 
And what to Guiscard is already done, 
Or to be done, is doomed, by thy decree, 
That, if not executed first by thee, 
Shall on my person be performed by me. 

" 'Away ! with women weep, and leave me here, 
Fixed, like a man, to die without a tear ; 
Or save, or slay us both this present hour, 
'Tis all that fate has left within thy power.' " 

The last of the three, Cymon and Iphigenia, has been a 
great favourite. In the original it is one of the most un- 
interesting stories of the Decameron, the single incident of 
Cymon's falling in love, of which not very much is made, 
being the only relief to a commonplace tale of violence 
and treachery, in which neither the motives nor the char- 
acters of the actors sufficiently justify them. The Italian, 
too, by making Iphigenia an unwilling captive, takes away 
from Cymon the only excuse he could have had. The three 
charming lines with which Dryden's poem opens — 

" Old as I am, for lady's love unfit, 
The power of beauty I remember yet. 
Which once inflamed my soul, and still inspires my wit," 

have probably bribed a good many readers, and certainly 
the whole volume of the Fables is an ample justification 
of the poet's boast, not only as regards beauty of ane kind, 
but of all. The opening triplet is followed by a diatribe 
against Collier, which at first seems in very bad taste ; but 
it is made, with excellent art, to lead on to a description of 



VIII.] THE FABLES. 167 

the power of love, to whicli the story yokes itself most nat- 
urally. Nor is any praise too higli for the description of 
the actual scene in which Cymon is converted from his 
brutishness by the sight of Iphigenia, an incident of which, 
as has been said, the original takes small account. But 
even with the important alterations which Dryden has in- 
troduced into it, the story, as a story, remains of but sec- 
ond-rate interest. 

Nothing of this sort can be said of Theodore and Hono- 
ria. I have said that Ellis's commendation of it mav be 
excessive ; but that it goes at the head of all the poetry 
of the school of which Dryden was a master is absolutely 
certain. The original here is admirably suggestive : the 
adaptation is more admirable in its obedience to the sug- 
gestions. It has been repeatedly noticed with what art 
Dryden has gradually led up to the horror of the phan- 
tom lady's appearance, which is in the original introduced 
in an abrupt and casual way; while the matter-of-factness 
of the spectre's address, both to Theodore himself and to 
the friends who wish afterwards to interfere in his vic- 
tim's favour, is most happily changed in the English poem. 
Boccaccio, indeed, master as he was of a certain kind of 
pathos, did not, at least in the Decameron, succeed with 
this particular sort of tragedy. His narrative has alto- 
gether too much of the chronicle in it to be fully impres- 
sive. Here Dryden's process of amplification has been of 
the utmost service. At almost every step of the story he 
has introduced new touches which transform it altogether, 
and leave it, at the close, a perfect piece of narrative of 
the horrible kind. The same abruptness which has been 
noticed in the original version of the earlier part of the 
story appears in the later. In Dryden, Honoria, impressed 
with the sight, and with Theodore's subsequent neglect of 



168 DEYDEN. [chap. 

her, dreams of what she has seen, and thinks over what 
she has dreamt, at last, and only at last, resolving to sub- 
due her pride and consent to Theodore's suit. Boccaccio's 
heroine goes straight home in a business-like manner, and 
sends " a trusty damsel " that very evening to inform her 
lover that she surrenders. This is, to say the least, sud- 
den. In short, the comparison is here wholly in favour of 
the English poet. Nor, if we drop the parallel, and look 
at Theodore and Honoria merely by itself, is it less ad- 
mirable. 

The purely original poems remain to be noticed. Of 
the Epistle to John Driden we know that Dryden him- 
self thought highly, while the person to whom it was ad- 
dressed was so pleased with it that he gave him " a noble 
present," said by family tradition to have been 500/., but 
which Malone, ex sua conjectura^ reduces to 100/. John 
Driden was the poet's cousin, and his frequent host at 
Chesterton. He was a bachelor, his house being kept by 
his sister Honor ; he was a member of Parliament, and an 
enthusiastic sportsman. Chesterton had come into the 
Dryden family by marriage, and John Driden inherited 
it as the second son. The poem contains, in allusion to 
Driden's bachelorhood, one of those objurgations on mat- 
rimony which have been interpreted in a personal sense, 
but which are, in all probability, merely the commonplaces 
of the time. Besides wives, physicians were a frequent 
subject of Dryden's satire ; and the passage in this poem 
about the origin of medicine has been learnt by almost 
every one. It might not have been written but for Black- 
more's sins, for Dryden had, in the postscript to his Virgil, 
paid an elaborate compliment to two ornaments of the 
profession. But it is naturally enough connected with a 
compliment to his cousin's sportsmanship. Then there is. 



VIII.] THE FABLES. 169 

what might be called a " Character of a good Member of 
Parliament," fashioned, of course, to suit the case of the 
person addressed, who, though not exactly a Jacobite, was 
a member of the Opposition. The poem ends with a 
most adroit compliment at once to the subject and to the 
writer. These complimentary pieces always please pos- 
terity with a certain drawback, unless, like the lines to 
Congreve, and the almost more beautiful lines on Oldham, 
they deal with merits which are still in evidence, and are 
not merely personal. But the judgment of Dorset and 
M(5Titague, who thought of this piece and of the exquisite 
verses to the Duchess of Ormond that he " never writ bet- 
ter," was not far wrong. 

The only piece that remains to be noticed is better 
known even than the Epistle to John Driden. Alexander's 
Feast was the second ode which Dryden wrote for the 
" Festival of St. Cecilia." He received for it 40/., which, 
as he tells his sons that the writing of it " would be 
noways beneficial," was probably unexpected, if the state- 
ment as to the payment is true. There are other legendary 
contradictions about the time occupied in writing it, one 
story saying that it was done in a single night, while an- 
other asserts that he was a fortnight in composing or cor- 
recting it. But, as has been frequently pointed out, the 
two statements are by no means incompatible. Another 
piece of gossip about this famous ode is that J)rydei} at 
first wrote Lais instead of Thais, whjch " small mistake " 
he bids Tonson in a letter to remember to alter. Little 
criticism of Alexander'' s Feast is necessary. Whatever 
drawbacks its form may have (especially the irritating 
chorus), it must be admitted to be about the best thing of 
its kind, and nothing more can be demanded of any poetry 
than to be excellent in its kind. Dryden himself thought 
M 8* 



170 DRYDEN. [chap. 

it the best of all his poetry, and he had a remarkable fac- 
ulty of self-criticism. 

This volume of poems was uot only the last that Dry- 
den produced, but it also exhibits his poetical character in 
its very best and most perfect form. He had, through all 
his long literary life, been constantly a student, always his 
own scholar, always correcting, varying, re-arranging, and 
refining. The citations already given will have shown at 
what perfection of metre he had by this time arrived. 
Good as his early (if not his earliest) works are in this 
respect, it must be remembered that it was long before he 
attained his greatest skill. Play-writing in rhyme and 
blank verse, practice in stanzas, and Pindarics, and irreg- 
ular lyrical measures, all went to furnish him with the ex- 
perience he required, and which certainly was not in his 
case the school of a fool. 

Beginning with a state of pupilage to masters who were 
none of the best, he subsequently took little instruction, 
except of a fragmentary kind, from any living man except 
Milton in poetry, and, as he told Congreve, Tillotson in 
prose. But he was none the less constantly teaching him- 
self. His vocabulary is naturally a point of great impor- 
tance in any consideration of his influence on our literature. 
His earliest work exhibits many traces of the scholastic 
and pedantic phraseology of his immediate forerunners. 
It is probable that in his second period, when his activity 
was chiefly dramatic, he might have got rid of this, had 
not the tendency been strengthened by the influence of 
Milton. At one period, again, the Gallicizing tendencies 
of the time led him to a very improper and inexcusable 
importation of French words. This, however, he soon 
dropped. In the meridian of his powers, when his great 
satires were produced, these tendencies, the classical and 



VIII.] THE FABLES. 171 

the Gallican, in action and re-action with his full command 
of English, vernacular and literary, produced a dialect 
which, if not the most graceful that the language has §ver 
known, is perhaps the strongest and most nervous. Little 
change takes place in the last twenty years, though the 
tendency to classicism and archaism, strengthened it may 
be by the work of translation, not unfrequently reappears. 
In versification the great achievement of Dryden was the 
alteration of what may be called the balance of the line, 
causing it to run more quickly, and to strike its rhymes 
with a sharper and less prolonged sound. One obvious 
means of obtaining this end was, as a matter of course, the 
isolation of the couplet, and the avoidance of overlapping 
the different lines one upon the other. The effect of this- 
overlapping, by depriving the eye and voice of the expec- 
tation of rest at the end of each couplet, is always one of 
two things. Either the lines are converted into a sort of 
rhythmic prose, made musical by the rhymes rather than 
divided by them, or else a considerable pause is invited at 
the end of each, or of most lines, and the cadence of the 
whole becomes comparatively slow and languid. Both 
these forms, as may be seen in the works of Mr. Morris, 
as well as in the older writers, are excellently suited for 
narration of some considerable length. They are less well 
suited for satire, for argument, and for the moral reflec- 
tions which the age of Dryden loved. He, therefore, set 
himself to elaborate the couplet with its sharp point, its 
quick delivery, and the pistol-like detonation of its rhyme. 
But there is an obvious objection, or rather there are sev- 
eral obvious objections which present themselves to the 
couplet. It was natural that to one accustomed to the 
more varied range of the older rhythm and metre, there 
might seem to be a danger of the snip-snap monotony 



112 DEYDEN. [chap. 

into whicli, as we know, it did actually fall when it passed 
out of tlie hands of its first great practitioners. There 
might also be a fear that it would not always be possible 
to compress the sense of a complete clause within the nar- 
row limits of twenty syllables. To meet these difficulties 
Dryden resorted to three mechanical devices — the hemi- 
stich, the Alexandrine, and the triplet ; all' three of which 
could be used indifferently to eke out the space or to give 
variety of sound. The use of the hemistich, or fragment- 
ary line, appears to have been based partly on the well- 
known practice of Virgil, partly on the necessities of 
dramatic composition where the unbroken English couplet 
is to English ears intolerable. In poetry proper the hemi- 
stich is anything but pleasing, and Dryden, becoming con- 
vinced of the fact, almost discarded it. The Alexandrine 
and the triplet he always continued to use, and they are 
to this day the most obvious characteristics, to a casual 
observer, of his versification. To the Alexandrine, judi- 
ciously used, and limited to its proper acceptation of a verse 
of twelve syllables, I can see no objection. The metre, 
though a well-known English critic has maltreated it of 
late, is a very fine one ; and some of Dryden's own lines 
are unmatched examples of that " energy divine " which 
has been attributed to him. In an essay on the Alex- 
andrine in English poetry, which yet remains to be writ- 
ten, and which would be not the least valuable of contri- 
butions to poetical criticism, this use of the verse would 
have to be considered, as well as its regular recurrent em- 
ployment at the close of the Spenserian stanza, and its 
continuous use, of which not many poets besides Drayton 
and Mr. Browning have given us considerable examples. 
An examination of the Polyolhion and of Fifine at the 
Fair, side by side, would, I think, reveal capacities some^ 



viii.] CORRESPONDENCE. 173 

what unexpected even in this form of arrangement. But 
so far as the occasional Alexandrine is concerned, it is not 
a hyperbole to say that a number, out of all proportion, of 
the best lines in English poetry may be found in the clos- 
ing verses of the Spenserian stave as used by Spenser him- 
self, by Shelley, and by the present Laureate, and in the 
occasional Alexandrines of Dryden. The only thing to 
be said against this latter use is, that it demands a very 
skilful ear and hand to adjust the cadence. So much for 
the Alexandrine. 

For the triplet I must confess myself to be entirely 
without affection. Except in the very rare cases when its 
contents come in, in point of sense, as a kind of paren- 
thesis or aside, it seems to me to spoil the metre, if any- 
thing could spoil Dryden's verse. That there was some 
doubt about it even in the minds of those who used it, 
may be inferred from the care they generally took to ac- 
company it in print with the bracket indicator, as if to 
invite the eye to break it gently to the ear. So strong 
was Dryden's verse, so well able to subdue all forms to 
its own measure, that in him it mattered but little ; in his 
followers its drawbacks at once appeared. 

A few personal details not already alluded to remain as 
to Dryden's life at this time. To this period belongs the 
second and only other considerable series of his letters. 
They are addressed to Mrs. Steward, a cousin of his, 
though of a much younger generation. Mrs. Steward was 
the daughter of Mrs. Creed, the already-mentioned inde- 
fatigable decorator of Northamptonshire churches and 
halls, and she herself was given to the arts of painting and 
poetry. She had married Mr. Elraes Steward, a mighty 
sportsman, whose house at Cotterstock still exists by the 
roadside from Oundle to Peterborough. The correspond- 



174 DRYDEN. ' [chap. 

ence extends over the last eighteen months of the poet's 
life, beginning in October, 1698, and not ending till a 
week or two before his death in the spring of 1700. Mrs. 
Steward is said to have been about eight-and-twenty at the 
time, and beautiful. The first letter speaks of a visit soon 
to be paid to Cotterstock after many invitations, and is 
rather formal in style. Thenceforward, however, the epis- 
tles, sometimes addressed to Mr. Steward (Dryden not in- 
frequently spells it Stewart and Stuart), and sometimes to 
his wife, are very cordial, and full of thanks for presents 
of country produce. On one occasion Dryden " intends " 
that Lady Elizabeth should " taste the plover he had re- 
ceived," an incident upon which, if I were a commentator^ 
I should build a legend of conjugal happiness quite as 
plausible, and probably quite as well founded, as the legend 
of conjugal unhappiness which has actually been construct- 
ed. Then there are injurious allusions to a certain par- 
son's wife at Tichmarsh, who is "just the contrary" of Mrs. 
Steward. Marrow puddings are next acknowledged, which 
it seems were so good that they had quite spoiled Charles 
Dryden's taste for any other. Then comes that sentence, 
" Old men are not so insensible of beauty as, it may be, 
you young ladies think," which was elsewhere translated 
into eloquent verse, and the same letter describes the 
writer as passing his time " sometimes with Ovid, some- 
times with our old English poet Chaucer." More ac- 
knowledgments of presents follow, and then a visit is 
promised, with the prayer that Mrs. Steward will have 
some small beer brewed for him without hops, or with a 
very inconsiderable quantity, because the bitter beer at 
Tichmarsh had made him very ill. The visit came off in 
August, 1699, and it is to be hoped that the beer was not 
bitter. After his return the poet sends, in the pleasant old 



VIII ] CORRESPONDENClJ. l'?6 

fashion, a history of his journey back to London, whither 
the stage coach took him out of his way, whereby, not 
passing certain friends' houses, he missed " two couple of 
rabbits, and Mr. Cole's Ribadavia wine," a stirrup cup of 
the latter being probably intended. In November occurs 
the famous description of himself as " a man who has 
done his best to improve the language, and especially the 
poetry," with much literary and political gossip, and occa- 
sional complaints of bad health. This letter may perhaps 
be quoted as a specimen : 

• "iVo?;. V, 1699, 

" Madam, — Even your expostulations are pleasing to me ; for 
though they show you angry, yet they are not without many expres- 
sions of your kindness ; and therefore I am proud to be so chidden. 
Yet I cannot so farr abandon my own defence, as to confess any idle- 
ness or forgetf ulness on my part. What has hind'red me from write- 
ing to you was neither ill health, nor, a worse thing, ingratitude ; but 
a flood of little businesses, which yet are necessary to my subsist- 
ance, and of which I hop'd to have given you a good account before 
this time : but the Court rather speaks kindly of me, than does any- 
thing for me, though they promise largely ; and perhaps they think 
I will advance as they go backward, in which they will be much de- 
ceiv'd ; for I can never go an inch beyond my conscience and my 
honour. If they will consider me as a man who has done my best to 
improve the language, and especially the poetry, and will be content 
with ray acquiescence under the present government, and forbearing 
satire on it, that I can promise, because I can perform it ; but I can 
neither take the oaths, nor forsake my religion ; because I know not 
what church to go to, if I leave the Catholique ; they are all so di- 
vided amongst themselves in matters of faith necessary to salvation, 
and yet all assumeing the name of Protestants. May God be pleased 
to open your eyes, as he has open'd mine ! Truth is but one ; and 
they who have once heard of it can plead no excuse if they do not 
embrace it. But these are things too seriows for a trifling letter. If 
you desire to hear anything more of my affairs, the Earl of Dorsett 
and your cousin Montague have both seen the two poems to the 
Duchess of Ormond and my worthy cousin Driden ; and are of opin- 



176 DRYDEN. [chap.viii. 

ion that I never writt better. My other friends are divided in their 
judgments which to pref err ; but the greater part are for those to 
my dear kinsman ; which I have corrected with so much care, that 
they will now be worthy of his sight, and do neither of us any dis- 
honour after our death. 

" There is this day to be acted a new tragedy, made by Mr. Hop- 
kins, and, as I believe, in rhime. He has formerly written a play 
in verse, called Boadicea, which you fair ladyes lik'd ; and is a poet 
who writes good verses, without knowing how or why ; I mean, he 
writes naturally well, without art, or learning, or good sence. Con- 
greve is ill of the gout at Barnet Wells. I have had the honour of 
a visite from the Earl of Dorsett, and din'd with him. Matters in 
Scotland are in a high ferment, and next door to a breach betwixt 
the two nations ; but they say from court that France and we are 
hand and glove. 'Tis thought the king will endeavour to keep up a 
standing army, and make the stirr in Scotland his pretence for it ; my 
cousin Driden and the country party, I suppose, will be against it; 
for when a spirit is raised, 'tis hard conjuring him down again. You 
see I am dull by my writeing news ; but it may be my cousin Creed 
may be glad to hear what I believe is true, though not very pleasing. 
I hope he recovers health in the country, by his staying so long in it. 
My service to my cousin Stuart, and all at Oundle. 
" I am, faire Cousine, 

" Your most obedient servant, 

"John Dbtden. 
" For Mrs. Stewart, Att 

Cotterstock, near Oundle, 

In Northamptonshire, 

These. 
To be left at the Post-house in Oundle." 



CHAPTER IX. 

CONCLUSION. 

DRYiTEN's life lasted but a very short time after the publi- 
cation of the Fables. He was, if not a very old man, close 
upon his seventieth year. He had worked hard, and had 
probably lived no more carefully than most of the men of 
his time. Gout, gravel, and other disorders tormented him 
sorely. The Fables were published in November, 1699, 
and durinsc the winter he was more or less ill. As has 
been mentioned, many letters of his exist in reference to" 
this time, more in proportion than for any other period of 
his life. Besides those to Mrs. Steward, there are some 
addressed to Mrs. Thomas, a young and pretty literary 
lady, who afterwards fell among the Philistines, and who 
made use of her brief intimacy with the Dryden family to 
romance freely about it, when in her later days she was 
indigent, in prison, and, what was worse, in the employ of 
Curll. One of these letters contains the frankest and most 
graceful of Dryden's many apologies for the looseness 
of his writings, accompanied by a caution to " Corinna " 
against following the example of the illustrious Aphra 
Behn, a caution which was a good deal needed, though un- 
fortunately fruitless. In the early spring of 1700, or, ac- 
cording to the calendar of the day, in the last months of 
1699, some of Dryden's admirers got up a benefit per- 



178 DRYDEK ' [chap. 

formance for him at tlie Duke's Theatre. Fletcher's Pil- 
grim was selected for the occasion, revised by Yanbrugh, 
and with the addition of a lyrical scene by Dryden him- 
self. He also wrote for the occasion a secular masque to 
celebrate the opening of a new century: the controversy 
on the point whether 1700 belonged to the seventeenth 
century or the eighteenth not having, it seems, arisen. 
The performance took place, but the date of it is uncer- 
tain, and it has been thought that it was not till after 
Dry den's death. This happened in the following wise: 
During the months of March and April Dryden was very 
ill with gout. One toe became much inflamed, and not be- 
ing properly attended to, it mortified. Hobbs, the surgeon, 
was then called in, and advised amputation, but Dryden 
refused on the score of his age, and the inutility of pro- 
longing a maimed existence. The mortification spreading 
farther, it was a case for amputation of the entire leg, 
with probably dubious results, or else for certain death. 
On the 30th of April the Postboy announced that " John 
Dryden, Esq., the famous poet, lies a-dying," and at three 
o'clock the next morning he died very quietly and peace- 
fully. 

His funeral was sufficiently splendid. Halifax is said 
to have at first offered to discharge the whole cost him- 
self, but other friends were anxious to share it, among 
whom Dorset and Lord Jeffreys, the Chancellor's son, are 
specially mentioned. The body was embalmed, and lay 
in state at the College of Physicians for some days. On 
the 13th of May the actual funeral took place at West- 
minster Abbey, with a great procession, preceded at the 
College by a Latin oration from Garth, the President, and 
by the singing of Exegi Monumentum to music. Years 
afterwards " Corinna " forged for Curll a wild account of 



IX.] CONCLUSION. 179 

the matter, of which it is sufficient to say that it lacks the 
slightest corroboration, and is intrinsically improbable, if 
not impossible. It may be found in most of the biogra- 
phies, and Malone has devoted his usual patient industry 
to its demolition. Some time passed before any monu- 
ment was erected to Dryden in Poet's Corner, where he 
had been buried by Chaucer and Cowley. Pepys tells us 
that Dorset and Montague were going to do it. But they 
did not. Some time later Congreve complimented the 
Duke of Newcastle on having given order for a monu- 
ment, a compliment which his Grace obtained at a re- 
markably cheap rate, for the order, if given, was never 
executed. Finally, twenty years after his death, the Duke 
of Buckinghamshire, better known under his former title 
of Lord Mulgrave, came to the rescue, it is said, owing to 
a reflection of Pope's on Dryden's " rude and nameless 
stone." The monument was not magnificent, but at any 
rate it saves the poet from such dishonour as there may 
be in a nameless grave. The hymn sung at his funeral 
probably puts that matter most sensibly. 

Dryden's wife lived until 1*714, and died a very old 
woman and insane. Her children, like her husband, had 
died before her. Charles, tte eldest, was drowned in the 
Thames near Datchet, in 1704; John, the second, hardly 
outlived his father a year, and died at Rome in 1701 ; the 
third, Erasmus Henry, succeeded, in 1710, to the family 
honours, but died in the same year. The house of Canons 
Ashby is still held by descendants of the family, but in 
the female line ; though the name has been unbroken, and 
the title has been continued. 

Something has already been said about the character of 
Lady Elizabeth Dryden. It has to be added here that the 
stories about her temper and relations with her husband 



180 DRYDEN. [chap. 

and his friends, bear investigation as little as those about 
her maidenly conduct. Most of them are mere hearsays, 
and some not even that. Dryden, it is said, must have 
lived unhappily with his wife, for he is always sneering at 
matrimony. It is suflBcient to say that much the same 
might be said of every writer (at least for the stage) be- 
tween the Restoration and the accession of Anne. Even 
the famous line in Absalom and Achitophel, which has 
caused such scandal, is a commonplace as old at least as 
Jean de Meung and the Roman de la Rose. When Ma- 
lone, on the authority of a Lady Dryden who lived a hun- 
dred years later, but without a tittle of documentary evi- 
dence, tells us that Lady Elizabeth was a shrew, we really 
must ask what is the value of such testimony ? There is 
one circumstantial legend which has been much relied on. 
Dryden, it is said, was at work one day in his study, when 
his wife came in, and could not make him listen to some- 
thing she had to say. Thereupon said she, in a pet, " I 
wish I were a book, and then perhaps you would pay me 
some attention." *' Then, my dear," replied this graceless 
bard, '' pray be an almanac, that I may change you at the 
end of the year." The joke cannot be said to be brilliant ; 
but, taking it as a true story, the notion of founding a 
charge of conjugal unhappiness thereon is sufficiently ab- 
surd. Mrs. Thomas's romancings are worthy of no credit, 
and even if they were worthy of any, do not bear much 
upon the question. All that can be said is, that the few 
allusions to Lady Elizabeth in the poet's letters are made 
in all propriety, and tell no tale of disunion. Of his chil- 
dren it is allowed that he was excessively fond, and his per- 
sonal amiability is testified to with one consent by all his 
friends who have left testimonies on the subject. Con- 
greve and " Granville the Polite " both mention his modest 



IX.] CONCLUSION. 181 

and unassuming demeanour, and the obligingness of his 
disposition. Pope, it is true, has brought against him^the 
terrible accusation that he was "not a genteel man," be- 
ing " intimate with none but poetical men." The fact on 
which the charge seems to be based is more than dubious, 
and Pope was evidently transferring his own conception of 
Grub Street to the times when to be a poetical man cer- 
tainly was no argument against gentility. Rochester, Mul- 
grave, Dorset, Sedley, Etherege, Roscommon, make a very 
odd assortment of ungenteel poetical friends. 

It is astonishing, when one comes to examine the mat- 
ter, how vague and shadowy our personal knowledge of 
Dryden is. A handful of anecdotes, many of them un- 
dated and unauthenticated except at third and fourth hand, 
furnish us with almost all that we do know. That he was 
fond of fishing, and prided himself upon being a better 
fisherman than Durfey ; that he took a good deal of snuff; 
and that he did not drink much until Addison, in the last 
years of his life, induced him to do so, almost exhausts 
the lists of such traits which are recorded by others. His 
" down look," his plumpness, his fresh colour are points 
in which tradition is pretty well supported by the portraits 
which exist, and by such evidence as can be extracted 
from the libels against him. The famous picture of him 
at Will's, which every one repeats, and which Scott has 
made classical in the Pirate, is very likely true enoiigh to 
fact, and there is no harm in thiqking of Dryden in the 
great coffee-hoi}se, with his chair in the balcony in suni- 
iper, by the fire in winter, passing criticisms and paying 
good-natured compliments on matters literary. He had, 
he tells Mrs. Steward, a very vulgar stomach — thus par- 
tially justifying Pope's accusations — and liked a chine of 
b^-con better than iparrow puddings. He dignified ^aiflr 



182 DRYDEN. [chap. 

uel Pepys with the title of Padron Mio, and was invited 
by Samuel to eat a cold chicken and a salad with him in 
return. According to one of the aimless gossiping stories, I 
which are almost all we possess, he once stayed with Mul- 
grave at the great Yorkshire domain whence the title was 
derived, and was cheated by Mulgrave at bowls — a story 
not so unbelievable as Mr. Bell seems to think, for every- 
body cheated at play in those days ; and Mulgrave's dis- 
inclination to pay his tradesmen, or in any other way to 
get rid of money, was notorious. But even the gossip 
which has come down to us is almost entirely literary. 
Thus we are told that when he allowed certain merits to 
" starch Johnny Crowne " — so called because of the unal- 
terable stiffness and propriety of his collar and cravat — he 
used to add that "his father and Crowne's mother had 
been great friends." It is only fair to the reputation of 
Erasmus Dryden and of Mrs. Crowne to add that this must 
have been pure mischief, inasmuch as it is always said that 
the author of Sir Courtly Nice was born in Nova Scotia. 
His well-feigned denunciation of Smith and Johnson, his 
tormentors, or rather the tormentors of his Eidolon Bayes, 
as " the coolest and most insignificant fellows " he had 
ever seen on the stage, may be also recalled. Again, there 
is a legend that Bolingbroke, when a young man, came in 
one morning to see him, and found that he had been sit- 
ing up all night writing the ode on St. Cecilia's Day. An- 
other time Bolingbroke called on him, and was asked to 
outstay Jacob Tonson, so as to prevent some apprehended 
incivility from the truculent Jacob. The story of his vex- 
ation at the liberty taken with him by Prior and Monta- 
gue has been already mentioned more than once, but may 
be regarded with very considerable suspicion. Most fa- 
mous perhaps of all such legends is that- which tells of the 



IX.] CONCLUSION. 183 

unlucky speech, " Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet," 
than which never was there anything more true or more 
unfortunate. Yet the enmity which, though it has been 
exaggerated, the greatest English man of letters in the 
next generation felt towards his kinsman ought not to be 
wholly regretted, because it has produced one of the most 
touchiner instances of literal devotion which even a com- 
mentator ever paid to his idol. Swift, it must be remem- 
bered, has injuriously stigmatized Dryden's prefaces as 

being 

" Merely writ at first for filling, 

To raise the volume's price a shilling." 

Hereupon Malone has set to, and has gravely demonstrated 
that, as the price at which plays were then issued was fixed 
and constant, the insertion of a long preface instead of a 
short one, or indeed of any preface at all, could not have 
raised the volume's price a penny. Next to Shadwell's 
criticism on MacJlecTcnoe, I think this may be allowed to be 
the happiest example recorded in connexion with the life 
of Dry den of the spirit of literalism. 

Such idle stuff as these legends mostly are is indeed 
hardly worth discussion, hardly even worth mentioning. 
The quiet scenery of the Nene Valley, in which Dryden 
passed all the beginning and not a little of the close of his 
life ; the park at Charlton ; the river (an imaginary asso- 
ciation perhaps, but too striking a one to be lost) on which 
Crites and Eugenius and Neander rowed down past the 
" great roar of waters " at London Bridge, and heard the 
Dutch guns as they talked of dramatic poesy ; the house 
in Gerrard Street ; the balcony and coffee-room at Will's ; 
the park where the ki^g walked with the poet ; and, last 
of all, the Abbey : these are the only scenes in which Dry- 
den can be pictured even by the most imaginative lover 



184 DRYDEN. [chap. 

of the concrete picturesque. Very few days of his life 
of nearly seventy years emerge for us from the mass by 
virtue of any definite and detailed incident, the account of 
which we have on trustworthy authority. It is a com- 
monplace to say that an author's life is in his works. 
But in Dryden's case it is a simple fact, and therefore a 
biography of him, let it be repeated at the close as it was 
asserted at the beginning, must consist of little but a dis- 
cussion and running comment on those works, and on the 
characteristics, literary and personal, which are discoverable 
in them. 

It only now remains to sum up these characteristics, 
which it must never be forgotten are of even more value 
because of the representative character of Dryden than 
because of his individual eminence. Many as are the 
great men of letters who have illustrated English litera- 
ture from the beginning to the present day, it may safely 
be said that no one so represented his time and so in- 
fluenced it as the man of letters whom we have been dis- 
cussing. There are greater names in our literature, no 
doubt ; there are others as great or nearly so. But at no 
time that I can think of was there any Englishman who, 
for a considerable period, was so far in advance of his 
contemporaries in almost every branch of literary work 
^s Dryden was during the last twenty years of the seyenr 
teenth century, To turn a satiric couplet of his own, by 
the alteration of a single word, frorn an insult tq a con^- 
pliment, we rqay say that he, at any rate during his last 
decade, 

■ ^ In prose and verse was owned without dispute 
Within the realms of English absolute." 

But his representative character in relation to the men of 
|iis tinje ^as alnaost iTiore remarkable tha^ his intellectual 



IX. 1 CONCLUSIOK 185" 

and artistic superiority to them. Other great men of let- 
ters, with perhaps the single exception of Voltaire, have 
usually, when they represented their time at all, represent- 
ed but a small part of it. With Dryden this was not the 
case. Not only did the immense majority of men of let- 
ters in his later days directly imitatp him, but both then 
and earlier most literary Englishmen, even when they did 
not imitate him, worked on the same lines and pursued 
the same objects. The eighteen volumes of his works 
contain a faithful representation of the whole literary 
movement in England for the best part of half a century, 
and what is more, they contain the germs and indicate the 
direction of almost the whole literary movement for nearly 
a century more. 

But Dryden was not only in his literary work a typical 
Englishman of his time, and a favourably typical one ; 
he was almost as representative in point of character. 
The tl.ue was not the most showy or attractive in the 
moral history of the nation, though perhaps it looks to 
us not a little worse than it was. But it must be admit- 
ted to have been a time of shameless coarseness in lan- 
guage and manners ; of virulent and bloodthirsty party- 
spirit; of almost unparalleled self-seeking and political 
dishonesty; and of a flattering servility to which, in the 
same way, hai'dly any parallel can be found. Its chief 
redeeming features were, that it was not a cowardly age, 
and, for the most part, not a hypocritical one. Men seem 
frequently to have had few convictions, and sometimes to 
have changed them with a somewhat startling rapidity ; 
but when they had them, they had also the courage of 
them. They hit out with a vigour and a will which to 
this day is refreshing to read of ; and when, as sometimes 
happened, they lost the battle, they took their punishment, 
N 9 



186 DKYDEN. [chap. 

as with perhaps some arrogance we are wont to say, like 
Eno-lishmen. Drvden had the merits and the deects 
eminently ; but the defects were, after all, in a mild and 
by no means virulent form. His character has had ex- 
ceedingly hard measure since. During the last ten years 
of his life, and for the most part of the half-century suc- 
ceeding his death, his political principles were out of 
favour, and this naturally prejudiced many persons against 
his conduct even at the time when his literary eminence 
was least questioned. In Johnson and in Scott, Dryden 
found a brace of the doughtiest champions, as heartily 
prepossessed in his favour as they were admirably armed 
to fight his battles. But of late years he has again fallen 
among the Philistines. It was obviously Lord Macaulay's 
game to blacken the greatest literary champion of the 
cause he had set himself to attack; and I need not say 
with what zest and energy Macaulay was wont to wield 
the tar-brush. Some years later Dryden had the good 
fortune to meet with an admirable editor of his poems. 
I venture to. think the late Mr. Christie's Globe edition 
of our poet one of the very best things of the kind that 
has ever been produced. From the purely literary point 
of view there is scarcely a fault to be found with it. But 
the editor unfortunately seems to have sworn allegiance 
to Shaftesbury before he swore allegiance to Dryden. 
He reconciled these jarring fealties by sacrificing the char- 
acter of the latter, while admitting his intellectual great- 
ness. An article to which I have more than once referred 
in the Quarterly Revieiv puts the facts once more in a 
clear and fair light. But Mr. Green's twice-published his- 
tory has followed in the old direction, and has indeed out- 
Macaulayed Macaulay in reckless abuse. I beheve that I 
have put the facts at least so that any reader who takes 



IX.] CONCLUSION. 187 

the trouble may judge for himself of the private conduct 
of Eiryden. His behaviour as a public man has also been 
dealt with pretty fully ; and I think we may safely con- 
clude that in neither case can the verdict be a really unfa- 
vourable one. Dry den, no doubt, was not austerely virtu- 
ous. He was not one of the men who lay down a compre- 
hensive scheme of moral, political, and intellectual conduct, 
and follow out that scheme, come wind, come weather. It 
is probable that he was quite aware of the existence and 
alive ^o the merits of cakes and ale. He was not an 
eponomical man, and he had no scruple in filling up gaps 
in his income with pensions and presents. But all these 
things were the way of his world, and he was not exces- 
sive in following it. On the other hand, all trustworthy 
testimony concurs in praising his amiable and kindly dis- 
position, his freedom from literary arrogance, and his will- 
ingness to encourage and assist youthful aspirants in liter- 
ature. Mercilessly hard as he hit his antagonists, it must 
be remembered that he was rarely the first to strike. On 
the whole, putting aside his licence of language, which, is 
absolutely inexcusable, but for which it must be remem- 
bered he not only made an ample apology, but such amends 
as were possible by earnestly dissuading others from fol- 
lowing his example, we shall be safe in saying that, though 
he was assuredly no saint, there were not so very many 
better men then living than John Dryden. 

A shorter summary will suffice for the literary aspect of 
the matter ; for Dryden's peculiarities in this respect have 
already been treated fully enough. In one of his own last 
letters he states that his life-object had been to improve 
the language, and especially the poetry. He had accom- 
plished it. With our different estimate of the value of 
Old English literature, we cannot, indeed, adopt Johnson's 



188 DRYDEN. [chap. 

famous metaphor, and say that " he found English of brick 
and left it of marble." The comparison of Hamlet and 
Macbeth to " brick," with Don Sebastian and the Spanish 
Friar for " marble," would be absurd. But in truth the 
terms of the comparison are inappropriate. English as 
Dry den found it — and it must be remembered that he 
found it not the English of Shakspeare and Bacon, not 
even the English of such survivals as Milton and Taylor, 
but the English of persons like Cowley, Davenant, and their 
likes — was not wholly marble or wholly brick. No such 
metaphor can conveniently describe it. It was rather an 
instrument or machine which had in times past turned out 
splendid work, but work comparatively limited in kind, 
and liable to constant flaws and imperfections of more or 
less magnitude. In the hands of the men who had lately 
worked it, the good work had been far less in quantity and 
inferior in quality ; the faults and flaws had been great 
and numerous. Dryden so altered the instrument and its 
working that, at its best, it produced a less splendid result 
than before, and became less suited for some of the high- 
est applications, but at the same time became available for 
a far greater variety of ordinary purposes, was far surer 
in its working, without extraordinary genius on the part of 
the worker, and was almost secure against the grosser im- 
perfections. The forty years' work which is at once the 
record and the example of this accomplishment is itself 
full of faults and blemishes, but they are always committed 
in the effort to improve. Dryden is always striving, and 
consciously striving, to find better literary forms, a better 
vocabulary, better metres, better constructions, better style. 
He may in no one branch have attained the entire and 
flawless perfection which distinguishes Pope as far as he 
goes ; but the range of Dryden is to the range of Pope as 



IX.] CONCLUSION. 189 

that of a forest to a shrubbery, and in this case priority 
is everything, and the priority is on the side of Dryden. 
He is not our greatest poet ; far from it. But there is 
one point in which the superlative may safely be applied 
to him. Considering what he started with, what he ac- 
complished, and what advantages he left to his successors, 
he must be pronounced, without exception, the greatest 
craftsman in English letters, and as such he ought to be 
regarded with peculiar veneration by all who, in however 
humble a capacity, are connected with the craft. 

This general estimate, as well as much of the detailed 
criticism on whicb it is based, and which will be found in 
the preceding chapters, will no doubt seem exaggerated to 
not a few persons, to the judgment of some at least of 
whom I should be sorry that it should seem so. The truth 
is, that while the criticism of poetry is in such a disorderly 
state as it is at present in regard to general principles, it 
cannot be expected that there should be any agreement 
between individual practitioners of it on individual points. 
So long as any one holds a definition of poetry which re- 
gards it wholly or chiefly from the point of view of its 
subject-matter, wide differences are unavoidable. But if 
we hold what I venture to think the only Catholic faith 
with regard to it, that it consists not in a selection of sub- 
jects, but in a method of treatment, then it seems to me 
that all difficulty vanishes. We get out of the hopeless 
and sterile controversies as to whether Shelley was a great- 
er poet than Dryden, or Dryden a greater poet than Shel- 
ley. For my part, I yield to no man living in rational ad- 
miration for either, but I decline altogether to assign marks 
to each in a competitive examination. There are, as it 
seems to me, many mansions in poetry, and the great poets 
live apart m them. What constitutes a great poet is su- 



190 DRYDEN. [chat 

premacy in his own line of poetioal expression^.- Such 
supremacy must of course be shown in work' of sufficier"" 
bulk and variety, on the principle that one swallow do 
not make a summer. We cannot call Lovelace a great 
poet, or Barnabe Barnes ; perhaps we cannot give the 
name to Collins or to Gray. We must be satisfied that 
the poet has his faculty of expression well at command, 
not merely that it sometimes visits him in a casual man- 
ner; and we must know that he can apply it in a sufficient 
number of different ways. But when we see that he can 
under these conditions exhibit pretty constantly the poet- 
ical differentia^ the power of making the common uncom 
mon by the use of articulate language in metrical arrange- 
ment so as to excite indefinite suggestions of beauty, theif' 
he must be acknowledged a master. 

When we want to see whether a man is a great poet or 
not, let us take him in his commonplaces, and see what he 
does with them. Here are four lines which are among 
the last that Dryden wrote ; they occur in the address to 
the Duchess of Ormond, who was, it must be remembered 
by birth Lady Margaret Somerset : 

" daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite 
The differing titles of the red and white, 
Who heaven's alternate beauty well display, 
The blush of morning and the milky way." 

The ideas contained in these lines are as old, beyond all 
doubt, as the practice of love-making between persons of 
the Caucasian type of physiognomy, and the images in 
which those ideas are expressed are in themselves as well 
worn as the stones of the Pyramids. But I maintain that 
any poetical critic worth his salt could, without knowing 
who wrote them, but merely from the arrangement of the 



'» 



1 ] CONCLUSION. 191 

words, \e rhythm and cadence of the line, and the manner 
il^ which the images are presented, write " This is a poet, 
a^ probably a great poet," across them, and that he would 
be right in doing so. When such a critic, in reading the 
works of the author of these lines, finds that the same touch 
is, if not invariably, almost always present; that in the 
handling of the most unpromising themes, the mots rayon- 
nants, the mots de lumiere are never lacking ; that the sug- 
gested images of beauty never fail for long together; then 
he is justified in striking out the " probably," and writing 
" This is a great poet." If he tries to go farther, and to 
range his great poets in order of merit, he will almost cer- 
taiTily fail. He cannot count up the beauties in one, and 
then the beauties in the other, and strike the balance ac- 
cordingly. He can only say, "There is the faculty of pro- 
ducing those beauties ; it is exercised under such condi- 
tions, and with such results, that there is no doubt of its 
being a native and resident faculty, not a mere casual in- 
spiration of the moment; and this being so, I pronounce 
the man a poet, and a great one." This can be said of 
Dryden, as it can be said of Shelley, or Spenser, or Keats, 
to name only the great English poets who are most dis- 
similar to him in subject and in style. All beyond this 
is treacherous speculation. 'The critic quits the assistance 
of a plain and catholic theory of poetry, and developes 
all sorts of private judgments, and not improbably private 
crotchets. The ideas which this poet works on are more 
congenial to his ideas than the ideas which that poet works 
on ; the dialect of one is softer to his ear than the dialect 
of another ; very frequently some characteristic which has 
not the remotest connexion with his poetical merits or 
demerits makes the scale turn. Of only one poet can it 
be safely said that he is greater than the other great poets. 



192 DKYDEN. [chap.ix.7^ 

for the reason that in Dry den's own words he is larger 
and more comprehensive than any of them. But with the 
exception of Shakspeare, the greatest poets in different 
styles are, in the eyes of a sound poetical criticism, very 
much on an equality. Dry den's peculiar gift, in which no 
poet of any language has surpassed him, is the faculty of 
treating any subject which he does treat poetically. His 
range is enormous, and wherever it is deficient, it is possi- 
ble to see that external circumstances had to do with the 
apparent limitation. That the author of the tremendous 
satire of the political pieces should be the author of the 
exquisite lyrics scattered about the plays; that the spiral 
pleader of Religio Laid should be the tale-teller of Pala- 
mon and Arcite, are things which, the more carefully I 
study other poets and their comparatively limited perfec- 
tion, astonish me the more. My natural man may like 
Kuhla Khan, or the Ode on a Grecian Urn, or the Ode 
on Intimations of Immortality, or World! Life! O 
Time ! with an intenser liking than that which it feels for 
anything of Dryden's. But that arises from the pure ac- 
cident that I was born in the first half of the nineteenth 
century, and Dryden in the first half of the seventeenth. 
The whirlio-io; of time has altered and is alterina^ this re- 
lation between poet and reader in every generation. But 
what it cannot alter is the fact that the poetical virtue 
which is present in Dryden is the same poetical virtue 
that is present in Lucretius and in ^schylus, in Shelley 
and in Spenser, in Heine and in Hugo. 



THE END. 



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